After the Show

Hollywood's next 10 years

2010-06-15T14:03:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 501, June 6, 2010

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HOLLYWOOD'S NEXT 10 YEARS:
IT WILL SURVIVE, AFTER ALL

Financially, it'll overcome big drops in DVD
sales; creatively, it's another story

By John Greenwald

This is the last of a series looking to the future of TV news, TV entertainment, film criticism and, today, movies. Today's column is also my last weekly "After the Show." For details, see the accompanying "Show's' over" box.

If I had written this at the beginning of 2009, it would have been a grim affair. The film industry was a mess. Business and content were suffering.

First, theater attendance was flat, if not shrinking slightly each year. True, in 2009 the average American went to the movies 4.3 times annually, up 4.6% from 2008, the Los Angeles Times reported. But that was the first increase since 2002.

The industry disguised those numbers by inching up ticket prices. An average ducat was $7.18 in 2008, and $7.50 in 2009, according to the Times. Cinema owners depend on snack bars, and their ever-increasing prices, to stay in business.

Of course, the real money for Hollywood, and the real profits, was DVD sales. But they began dropping sharply from their peak of $12 billion in 2004. By 2009, DVD sales had fallen 27% to $8.6 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Next, Hollywood felt it was beset by piracy, costing it $6 billion a year in lost DVD sales and illegal movie downloads on Web. Only last month, the producer of the Oscar-winning "The Hurt Locker" (2009) sued unnamed thousands, saying they illegally downloaded the war movie.

Worse, movie quality was stuck in teen-oriented action movies, comic book super heroes, seen-it-before horror films, gross-out comedies, and sequels and three-quels. The studios were aiming lower and lower, and filmmakers were loosing their skills.

What changed in 18 months? I could answer with one word -- "Avatar" (2009) -- but that's only half the story.

Yes, James Cameron's 3-D extravaganza broke box office records: $2.7 billion worldwide through May 31, according to Box Office Mojo. Most significantly, it retaught Hollywood that audiences will leave their TVs and computer screens for a truly exciting film experience, even if it means paying a few bucks more. Director Tim Burton's 3-D "Alice in Wonderland" did well at the box office despite tepid reviews, as did DreamWorks Animation's highly praised "How to Train Your Dragon," also in 3-D.

Hollywood is promising more 3-D pictures until 2-D become obsolete. However, I fear that soon enough it will turn 3-D into a worthless gimmick. Do I really want to see a 3-D romantic comedy starring Kirsten Dunst and Ashton Kutcher, or a serious drama with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, unless they take place on a roller coaster? No way.

But once filmmakers learn how to make 3-D films that use this new medium to create a new kind of filmgoing experience, motion pictures as an art form and as a business will have a fantastic future. That's 10 years into the future. (Meanwhile, computer animated 3-D movies have already expanded the family film market.)

More immediately, the studios are trying to push their wares directly into viewers' homes. A list of business plans, hardware, software and related deals could fill this page. The long-term goal is to do away with the cable box, DVD, Blu-ray and movie disk technology and replace them with a single box next to your 52-inch 3-D TV screen.

That magic box would connect you to your cable system, the Internet and a variety of streaming Web services for all the movies, sports, news and sitcoms you'd ever want to see. Probably satellite radio, too. Forget walking to your mailbox to get the latest film from Netflix. All you'll have to do is master the most complicated remote on Earth.

Already Time Warner Cable is working with the major Hollywood studios (of which it's one) to create "home theater on demand." Instead of waiting four months after theatrical release to see a movie on DVD or cable, you'll see one at home in just 30 days -- for $20 to $30 a screening, the Journal reports.

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart has just bought Vudo, the highly praised but little known software system that supplies movies and TV shows over the Web directly to HD TVs and Blu-ray players. To get that content, Vudo's been trying to license deals with major movie studios and distributors, but with limited success. Wal-Mart's massive buying power should change that. Also, Sundance and YouTube have set up their own deals with studios to rent movies directly to viewers.

If done right, Hollywood could more than overcome its stagnant box office and big loss of DVD income with "event" 3-D movies and negotiated digital downloads. Just don't count on 3-D TV. It's so expensive, you could take a family of 200 to see "Avatar" in IMAX 3-D for what it costs to buy a quality home 3-D TV system today. It'll take least five years for 3-D TV to meaningfully add to Hollywood's revenue stream.

And what about piracy? One side of Hollywood's still issuing reports and wringing its hands over it. But only last month, Jeff Bewkes, chairman and CEO of Time Warner (Warner Bros. movies, HBO, CNN, etc.) told Wall Street that piracy has stabilized and now has a limited impact on Time Warner.

The film business will slowly improve during the next 10 years. Movies are the most powerful story-telling medium yet invented. And technology will make movie going more convenient than ever.

One big problem: The studios are far behind the technology in making films people will go their way to see. An "Avatar" will come along only once every 10 years, if that. 3-D will save neither the industry nor the art form. That will take adventurous, cliché-hating studios and filmmakers up to this new decade's brand new creative challenges.

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'SHOW'S' OVER

This is my last weekly "After the Show" column for the Waterbury Sunday Republican. "After the Show" has lasted 501 columns and more than 10 years. Not a bad run, as they say in show business. If I want to write the occasional column, the editors say they'll make room.

"After the Show" began as an experiment: a weekly essay on movies and television, as opposed to a column of reviews. The idea was to capture the spirit and ideas of conversations friends have after they've seen a film together. I hope I've achieved that.

A few thanks:

To you, the readers. Whether to praise or pan, you've said you were regular readers. I appreciate your loyalty.

To the talented people who make films and TV shows. Without your work, our lives would be much less rewarding.

To Executive Editor Jon F. Kellogg, who took a gamble, and to Features Editor Debra Aleksinas, who always encouraged me.

And to my wife, the lovely Rita Lipman, whose copy reading was invaluable, and whose support as I struggled with illness and injury was absolutely essential.

-- John Greenwald

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.

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Leonard Maltin's mad about movies

2010-06-02T20:02:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 500, June 5, 2010

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LEONARD MALTIN: IS HE
EVER MAD ABOUT MOVIES?

Two new books reveal this critic and
historian's crazy love for motion pictures

By John Greenwald

In his official biography, Leonard Maltin says he's a film critic and historian. True as that many be, I think of Maltin as America's greatest film fan. He loves movies and the people who make them -- not only the big stars but the not-as-famous but the lesser-known performers and other artists who work behind the camera.

If you follow movies, it's hard to miss Maltin's smiling, salt-and-pepper bearded face. Every September, his "Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide" comes out, filling bookstores and airport news racks. He's been editing the guides with a small squad of sub-editors since 1969. They were updated irregularly until they became an annual in 1987. The 2010 edition has 17,000 entries, with 300 new ones.

(Since 17,000 are about as many mini-reviews a printer can fit into a 1664-page paperback, I wonder where the 300 deleted entries go to make room for the new ones each year. I wish Maltin and his publisher have set up a searchable database on the Web for all his "Movie Guide" entries. I'd pay good money for that. However, Maltin has put many of his older reviews in editions of his "Classic Movie Guide.")

Maltin's written or co-written books on animation, radio's golden age, the Little Rascals, movie comedians, Disney movies, cinematography, a family film guide and a film encyclopedia.

He's also all over TV. For 29 years, he's been a film historian and correspondent for the syndicated "Entertainment Tonight." On cable, he appears on the Starz network and the Reelz!Channel. He co-produced the DVD collection of "Walt Disney Treasures" and hosts a series of John Wayne feature films for Paramount Home Video and "Night at the Movies" segments for Warner Home Video. He's active in film preservation and helps select the 25 films named each year to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

And he has a Web site: Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy at http://blogs.indiewire.com/leonardmaltin -- a collection of his reviews of new films, old ones, and pieces about film ephemera, such as old movie magazines. He's a film critic and historian of course, but for me Leonard Maltin is America's greatest film fan.

Which brings me to two recent books of his that I've been reading: "Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen" (Harperstudio, 2010) and "Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy" (M Press, 2008). (Note how Maltin's name goes above the title; he's become a brand unto himself, like certain movies stars.)

What struck me about his "151 Films" is the enthusiasm with which he writes his short reviews -- each is one plus pages. A few examples.

"La Cuidad" (1999): "When a movie stays in my consciousness for years it's amazing."

"King of the Hill" (1993): "When I see a movie I like I want to spread the word. When I see a movie I love [Matlin's italic] I become a one-man public relations campaign ... ."

"What Doesn't Kill You": "If ever a film deserves a second chance, this one does."

"Scarecrow" (1973) "is a road movie crossed with a character study, and the two stars [Gene Hackman and Al Pacino] catch lightening in a bottle."

Each review is complete with pithy plot lines and character descriptions, comments about both, and why these films failed at the box office despite their obvious excellence.

There are many books like Maltin's "151 Best Movies You've Never Seen." They're usually old within five years. But Maltin makes one strong editorial decision. He limits all but a few choices to films made in the last 20 years -- a wise choice. (By now, unheralded but excellent movies of a generation or three ago have become heralded, anyway.)

Maltin's 151 picks rank among what he calls the "unfamiliar." Independent and foreign films, documentaries as compelling as fiction films, offbeat ones, and films that should have developed a reputation, but didn't.

Though I see upwards of 220 movies a year, and try to stay away from too many big box off hits, I've only seen maybe 20 percent of the films in this book. But the book's dangerous for Netflix subscribers like me; I can see myself immediately adding another 50 titles to my Netflix queue.

Maltin's "Movie Crazy" is for film lovers only. It's mainly interviews with people filmgoers under 40 have probably never heard of. There's chapter on "Silent Sabotage," stars who should have the made transition from silents to talkies, but didn't; Joan Leslie, a 1940's star; and Jimmy Lydon, a child though adult actor, 1939-1987 (his Henry Aldrich teen movies almost ruined his career, because of typecasting).

Other interviews include writer-director Blake Edwards, director of photography Joseph Biroc, and orchestrator Alexander Courage, who wrote the "Star Trek" theme. Maltin is mainly interested how his subjects began in Hollywood, and most have nothing but kind words about their studio-mates However, Lydon is brutal about a few, including famed director Victor Fleming. He "didn't know beans about directing," Lydon says.

Oh, Maltin has one "scoop," that Jack Warner wanted to sign Orson Welles to star in "The Man Who Came to Dinner" (1942). Didn't happen.

Both highly informative books offer insight to Maltin's mad love of movies, his readable writing style and the wealth of film knowledge inside his broadly smiling head.

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.

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Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved

TV news' split into two camps

2010-06-02T15:14:00.000-07:00

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TV NEWS' LONG-LASTING
SPLIT INTO TWO CAMPS

'Straight' news from the Big 3, CNN;
'news and commentary' from Fox, MSNBC
Number 499, May 30, 2010

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By John Greenwald

On Oct. 7, 1996, television news split into two when the Fox News Channel first came into 10 million TV homes (as of last year, it reached 102 million households). Also in 1996, MSNBC became another cable news channel; more than 78 million homes receive it today.

Since then, TV news has evolved from a single approach to news telecasts -- let's call it "middle-of-the-road" -- to today's split approach.

On one side of this divide are the "middle-of-the-road" TV news outlets: the three broadcast networks, with their half-hour evening news programs, and, on cable, CNN, available 24/7. On the other side are what I think of as the "news and comment" cable news channels: Fox on the right and MSNBC on the left.

Some readers may object to my calling CNN et al as middle-of-the-road. It's all in the eye of the beholder, and I'll leave it at that. However, those readers now have places go -- Fox News and talk radio -- which have become powerful political and cultural forces.

This two-sided TV news set-up is good for viewers who want news relatively undusted by partisan attitudes or politics, and for viewers who want their news brightened with red or blue sparkles. While that split has only been around for fewer than 15 years, I believe it's a permanent part of TV news, at least for the next 20 -- unless America's great red, blue and purple divide changes.

Fox News has set the standard for this split from the get-go. Rupert Murdoch, the worldwide, multi-media gazillionaire, wanted a TV news outlet to offset what he felt was the liberal bias of CNN and the broadcast Big 3. With his cash and mentorship (he already was running a 24/7 cable/satellite news operation in Great Briton), he hired Roger Ailes, a long-time Republican operative with cable news experience on a forerunner of MSNBC (of all things) and CNBC, NBC's cable business channel.

Separate from his conservative views, Ailes is also a master showman. On Fox, stories are as short as possible. Its on-screen talent is good-looking. The women are young, usually blond, usually better than pretty, and with long necks and widely spaced cheekbones. I'm not as good reading male looks, but I assume Fox's male on-screen talent is equally attractive.

Extremely important is the appearance of Fox's TV screen itself. Think pinball machine. And not the old-fashioned mechanical kind but the new electronic kind, which are half pinball and half videogame. From American flags a'waving, to bright red "Breaking News" alerts for minor stories, to exploding logos attached to continuing stories, Fox's graphic designers never rest. The more fonts, the better. With Fox, every sentence feels like it ends with an exclamation point, deserved or not.

The total Fox package says Exciting! Exciting! Exciting!, no matter how dull the story behind the hyped-up razzmatazz. That alone attracts viewers. Fox's conservative slant is almost icing on the cake. (Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" takes special fun satirizing Fox's graphics. Too bad other cable news channel merely copy Fox's excesses.)

Whatever the reasons, politics or pizzazz, Fox has defined a market, fulfilled a need and has been number one in cable news ratings for 100 months in a row -- quite a record, especially in the slippery world TV news ratings. True, on any given day, during any particular hour, for any particular demographic group, Fox may slip behind MSNBC or CNN. But that 100-month is solid and sure to continue for months, if not years, to come.

Like MSNBC, Fox is not all one side all the time. Both channels intersperse their opionators with straight news coverage. But like MSNBC, Fox's key prime-time personalities set the tone: Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly on Fox; Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC.

But let's put Fox News and our new world of bifurcated TV news in perspective. First, middle-of-the-road news still dominates. Ratings for the Big 3 half-hours and CNN's combined are larger than Fox and MSNBC's combined, even though on occasion Fox beats CBS. These comparisons will always be dicey, as we're comparing broadcast TV to cable, which reaches about 25-30 percent fewer households.

Plus, things change. In April, CNN was up a bit, Beck was down, but Fox still dominated.

Long-term, Fox may have viewership and advertising problems. Its base of old, conservative white Republicans is slowly shrinking. And that base's children aren't as conservative, especially on issues like abortion and gay rights.

Fox News' clear embrace of the GOP agenda, and this year the Tea Party's, also narrows its growth possibilities, if not now then certainly in 10 years. In 20 years, it may suffer from the same loss of interest as Republicans when Latinos and other minorities grow in political and marketing power.

Over time, all successful businesses have to stop appealing to their customers and start appealing to their customers' children. This is especially true for the news and entertainment media.

Bifurcated TV news is a permanent change, I believe. But for Fox to keep its dominance on its side of the purple-red-blue divide, it must keep up with the marketplace, especially the kind advertisers like.

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.

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Action: The Soul of Movies

2010-05-28T13:39:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 498, May 9, 2010

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THERE'S A REASON FILMS
ARE CALLED MOVIES

Beginning with the first flip books,
the point of movies was movement

By John Greenwald

The conversation went like this.

She: What movies have you seen lately?

Me: Yesterday, I saw "The Losers."

She: I heard it's junk.

Me: Well, it is a mindless action movie, and I loved it!

She: You loved it? How?

Me: Because it moved! Let me explain.

From their very beginning, the point of movies, their raison d'etre, was movement. Call them flip books, movies, films, or motion pictures, or as we once called them the chronophotographic camera (Greek for "pictures of time"), or the Kinetograph, or the cinemtograph), their purpose was to capture movement and project those moving images to a paying audience.

The key was movement.

The earliest films were little more than home movies. Thomas Edison produced such films as "Fred Ott's Sneeze" (1894) and boxing matches. A French cameraman shot a steam locomotive pulling into a station. Few in the audience had ever seen a movie before, so this one seemed so realistic that many ran from the theater scared to death that a real train was about to run over them.

"The Great Train Robbery" (1903) had three firsts: first fiction film with a clear narrative, first action film and first Western. All this in a 12-minute movie.

It has bandits sneaking onto a moving train; a pistol duel between a bandit and a guard protecting a large trunk of cash; a scene in a dance hall where a nearly dead telegraph operator tells what happened; a posse chasing after the bandits; and the final, deadly shoot out.

This little movie set up the next century of filmmaking, right up to "Avatar" (2009) and "The Losers" (2010), and with many more to come.

"Robbery's" last scene has nothing to do with the rest of the story. The lead bandit, played by a young vaudeville performer, "Bronco" Billy Anderson, takes direct aim at the audience in a dramatic close up of his face and pistol. The shot suddenly explodes across the screen. Martin Scorsese paid homage to that shot in "Goodfellas" (1990), as did Ridley Scott in "American Gangster" (2007).

Action films have always been part of American cinema; there's even a Museum of the Moving in Image in New York City. Yet, many people look down on them as mindless. They use the expression "mindless action movie" so often it's become a redundancy.

But action movies are no more mindless than abstract art or ballet or classical music. Instead of narratives, these arts are filled with sweeps of movement, color and patterns. Movies' film editing enhances and dramatizes the action. These films take advantage of the art and technologies of sound, music and computer graphics, all to enhance the movement.

Humans are selfish people. They want to see themselves in narrative fiction. It's not enough there are poems, novels, plays and TV to focus on them. Amateur and professional critics want movies to explore the human condition. For them it's enough movement for Seymour Phillip Hoffman to slouch in despair in some lifeless, pointless existential drama.

But that's not a movie; it's a performance best suited for the stage. (Movies do record and preserve such performances, without advancing the art.) There's no reason to diminish movies simply because they move. That's like diminishing dances because they're not pantomimes of Shakespeare. Or Jackson Pollack because he's not Norman Rockwell. Or contemporary composer John Adams because he doesn't write advertising jingles.

Even a picture with a simplistic plot, such as "The Losers," needs thought, intelligence and talent to make all that action entertaining and engaging. Sure, the movie is just another revenge drama. But the filmmakers give us enough about the half-dozen thankfully brief and unobtrusive.

The action scenes often take their time to build before their payoffs, which are complicated, noisy and full of carefully wrought filmmaking -- all designed to give us a good, fast-moving, exciting time.

Some action films, like John Ford's "Stagecoach" (1939), combine Western action with revealing character drama. Still, the most powerful moment in the movie happens when John Wayne suddenly arrives to stop the stagecoach, his rifles aggressively perched on his legs. The camera lens moves right up to him. It was enough to take my breath away. For me, everything before and after that moment was merely commentary. That shot was the peak of "Stagecoach's" dramatic arc.

I could go on for another 850 word on why movement is the very heart of the best pictures and should be appreciated for that.

Movement begins with the visions of writers, directors and producers. Let them argue about character development and plot twists. I can get caught up in all that as much as anyone. But when a film begins [begin to move, I get interested. Whether its characters are crawling on the floor to avoid bad guys or are riding computerized flying horses, that's what gets me most excited, most pleased. No other dramatic art does that, or can stir me just that way.

So-called mindless action movies are the soul of the art of the motion picture.

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.

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Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved

There's only so much a critic can take

2010-05-26T20:28:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 497, May 2, 2010

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WHY EBERT'S THUMBS DOWN IS
HIS READERS A THUMBS UP

For the controversial 'Kick-Ass,'
there's only so much a critic can take.

By John Greenwald

What does it mean when Roger Ebert, still America's best-known movie critic, gives a film a one-star rating, but the readers of his Web site give it three and one-half stars. I can't remember such a wide spread for a film on his site.

The movie is "Kick-Ass," based on a comic book series. It's both a send-up of teenage dweeb comedies and a brutal, bloodletting action film. It's also become controversial because of a major character, an 11-year-girl named "Hit Girl."

With her pigtails and big eyes, she's cute as a button -- except when she puts on her purple leathers, purple punk wig, black mask and Dick Cheney snarl. Then her style becomes as cold as the razor-sharp blades she hurls at scores of bad guys, killing them all.

To moviegoers nearing 50, especially film critics, there's something outright unnerving about Hit Girl, her obscene language, heartless violence and over-adoring relationship with her father. He's an ex-cop who's out to kill the drug kingpin responsible for the death of his wife and Hit Girl's mother. Pop goes by the nom de superhero Big Daddy and dresses in Batman-like black leather and cowl.

He's also a comic book artist, no less, who fills his studio with walls of weapons -- from tiny handguns to a giant bazooka. Big Daddy has trained his daughter how to use those weapons and all means of hand-to-hand combat so, on screen at least, she out moves and out kills Hong Kong's chop-socky greats. Big Daddy is played by Nicholas Gage, whose gravel voice and threatening posture add to father and daughter's creepy relationship.

All this in a movie that's supposed to be about a superhero-obsessed high schooler who's armed with little more than a green wet suit, force of will and the name Kick-Ass. That plotline, told with a gently wry touch, had possibilities. But it quickly devolves (or accelerates, depending on your taste) into ultra-violent action.

Beyond the predictable acrobatic ninja-type fights and shoot-'em-ups, the specialty of "Kick-Ass" is imploding and exploding bodies, especially heads. Hiding this gore behind plates of glass doesn't diminish its ugliness.

Put all these elements together -- the kinky 11-year-old with her cold-blooded violence, her adoring but icky love of her equally vicious and kinky father, and those viscera-splattered windows -- and you see why this was one too many for Ebert and other critics, especially those into middle age and beyond.

Or, you could relish the over-the-top characters and performers, admire their choice of weapons and the film's semi-successful attempts at humor. Plus, one can always enjoy Kick-Ass' uncostumed efforts to win the heart that beautiful girl of his dreams.

But "Kick-Ass'" outré efforts to mix high school comedy, a bizarre father-daughter love, and disturbing action-bloodshed are too hard to take -- unless you're with the program.

My guess is those people on Ebert's Website who gave the film three and one-half stars caught the let's-rub-it-in-their-face attitudes that have marked comic books since E.C. comic's Mad became an international best seller in the 1950s. Its irony and satire easily oozed into elements of the E.C.'s horror, war and crime comics, also in the early 1950s.

But a hyperventilating U.S. congress, unable to comprehend why some of nation's teens had succumbed to juvenile delinquency, became convinced by a scare-mongering shrink, Dr. Fredric Wertham, that comics were responsible.

The industry set up in 1954 the Comics Code to prevent government censorship, much as the film industry had done with its Production Code and rating system. The Comics Code killed the comic book industry as then constituted and created a generation of bland books, filled with capes, bulging muscles and predictable plots, except for a few titles such as Spider-Man. Only when publishers circumvented the code by selling their magazines directly to comic book stores, and not through newsstand distributors, did a new age of creative freedom emerge.

Hollywood noticed. First, superhero comics became easier to realistically film, thanks to special effects. The industry brought us film series built around "brands" of superheroes: Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, X-Men and Iron Man, among others.

But Hollywood also has dipped into alternative comics and graphic novels, with films like "Ghost World" (2001), "Road to Perdition" (2002), "American Splendor" (2003) and "Watchmen" (2009).

"Kick-Ass" is just too derivative and disturbing for Ebert to take. But not for most viewers. The Rotten Tomatoes Website divides its reviews into two major categories: Top Critics and RT Community. "Kick-Ass" received 71% from Top Critics and 91% from Community. That's a wide difference between those have to see movies (the critics) and those who see movies mainly to enjoy them (the fans). For a film like "Kick-Ass," which pushes if not breaks various artistic, social and cultural envelopes, the RT Community is a self-selecting group that walks in the door predisposed to like the picture.

"Kick-Ass" is, in its excesses, the kind of film that separats the critics from the fans. Only history will decide which group better understood and appreciated the film -- whether it's depraved junk or adventuresome entertainment. In that sense, "Kick-Ass" is a worthy and challenging enterprise that helps us define our taste and our judgment. It's not bland.

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.

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TV's future: More channels, more gizmos

2010-05-23T06:21:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 496, April 25, 2010

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TV'S FUTURE: MORE
CHANNELS, MORE GIZMOS

An over-abundance of content converges
with a plethora of viewing devices

By John Greenwald

Years ending in zero are a good time for looking forward -- while looking back. They tell us about the decade to come. In this and future columns, I hope to peak at the next 10 years in entertainment TV, news TV and in movies.

This week, the future of TV entertainment.

Ten years ago, broadcast television was the dominant form of television. You know, that mélange of over-the-air stations with rabbit ears antennae you had to jiggle around for good reception. But even in 2000, broadcast TV was giving way to cable. Today, TV audiences may spend most of their TV time watching the four broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox); by 2020, that will change, as cable and its ever-growing number of new stations attract more and more viewers.

For example, you may think Discovery is a single cable station, but it's not. Discovery Communications, Inc., is a $3-billion, worldwide network of 29 separate cable stations in scores of countries around the world. Its offerings range from the Military Channel to TreeHugger, and it's joined with Oprah Winfrey to create a new cable station, OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network.

There are similar co-joined, spun off, merged or acquired cable networks, many part of broadcasting conglomerates, such as NBC's CNBC and MSNBC. Expect even more choices, especially as cable companies switch from copper wires (hence the word cable) to glass wires (fiber optics). Fiber optics not only handle much more information and many more channels, but they're also faster. Downloading a 2-hour movie on regular cable takes 53 minutes, but only 16 using fiber optics, says Verizon, which is pushing its fiber FiOS service.

In 10 years, we'll all be fibered up, receiving more channels that the mind can conceive. Forget Animal Planet; we'll have the Pet Planet. Turner Classic Movies might niche itself into TCM Film Noir and TCM Musicals. Or TCM Pro, where film professors and professionals provide educated running commentaries before, during and after each film. How about a channel specializing in big things, say the universe, or small things, say microbiology?

We'll be choosing among 'tween, half-size, Victorian, vintage and couture fashion channels. We'll have more than one right wing, left wing, down the middle and comedy news channels. Today, we have at least a score of food channels, but I'm waiting for two dessert channels -- low calorie and high calorie. How about soup-only, or appetizer-only, or table setting-only channels?

All this variety will come raining down, whether you want it or not, depending on how many tiers of cable programming you can afford.

But old-fashioned, over-the-air broadcasting won't die, even though it has some natural disadvantages over cable. It's totally dependent on advertising, while cable gets revenues from both advertisers and subscribers. And cable doesn't have the blue-nosed FCC fining it for a random dirty word or flash of semi-demi-quasi nudity.

Standard TV continues to be the greatest mass marketing medium ever devised, if you want to sell box cars of beer or frozen pizza. Yet, standard TV can't deliver cable's niche audiences. However, compelling live events, such as sports, will attract the massive audience some advertisers still crave.

"Addressable" advertising is part of the Internet. Amazon, Netflix, Google and other merchants know what movies, music and books you may want to buy based on your previous purchases or Web visits. They use that info to slip in ads selling similar merchandise. As the technology improves, it will read your TV remote's clicks. Who knows what sales pitch will pop up? Maybe "this fast-forward brought to you by Mercedes."

To most viewers, there's no difference between over-the-air and cable TV. They are indistinguishable clicks on the remote, despite the TV industry's separate business models.

However, now it gets complicated. All that ever specialized content no longer comes into a single box into your family room. Depending on how many people in your household, especially kids under 25, TV of all kinds plays on TV screens, large and small, and cell phones, smart phones, iPhones, iPods, iPads, and all their iBrethren to come. Web-TV intermingles Web sites that play TV shows with movies downloaded from Netflix to your PC or TV.

The ways we get TV depend on technologists, who invent all this stuff, and the marketers, who try to sell it to us. Sometimes it works, like DVRs, CDs and DVDs. Sometimes it doesn't, like quadraphonic LPs.

I don't know what gizmo or gimmick is in the future, except 3-D TV. That's at least five years off, especially for the average TV viewer. The sets are much too expensive, $2,500 for a decent-sized set and proper cable box and Blu-ray DVD player. The special battery powered glasses cost upwards of $120 each (don't invite the neighbors over).

However, in 10 years I expect almost all television will be 3-D, whether 3-D adds anything or not. (Imagine "The View" in 3-D.) In 10 to 15 years, they'll even figure out how to get 3-D squeezed into smart phones, without special glasses, and onto eyeglasses themselves.

Indeed, the word for squeezing all this content into all these different TV devices is convergence. More stuff coming in -- to more stuff going out. The mind reels.

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.

-- 30 --

Is there a future for film critics?

2010-05-22T15:22:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 495, April 18, 2010

===============================

IS THERE A FUTURE FOR
FILM CRITICS, GOOD OR BAD?

While fewer and fewer reviewers write
for print, Web criticism explodes

By John Greenwald

Since January 2006, Sean P. Means, film critic of the Salt Lake Tribune, has been posting on his blog a running count of movie critics who have lost their jobs due to reassignments, buyouts, layoffs, retirements or publication failures. As of last May, the number of the departed had risen to 55. He hasn't updated his list since, but eventually it will include Todd McCarthy, Variety's long-term, highly respected film reviewer.

Variety had been considered the bible of show business. With the firing of McCarthy and other critics and writers, Variety's less a bible than a street corner tract. McCarthy, by virtues of his experience and trustworthiness, was part of the glue that held Hollywood's business and creative communities together. No longer.

Means will also add the syndicated movie review TV show, "At the Movies," with the Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips and the New York Times' A.O. Scott. While Phillips and Scott will keep their newspaper day jobs, the program itself will end in August when its current run expires.

Scott acknowledged there no longer was a place in TV's economic firmament for a half-hour show starring two critics talking about movies. That might have been true during the show's first two decades when it featured Chicago film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. Their love-hate relationship, which revolved around their respective opinions, usually was more compelling than the films they reviewed. One writer even compared them to Oscar and Felix of "The Odd Couple."

The most recognizable name on Means' list of ex-critics is David Ansen, who took a 2008 buyout from Newsweek. He's now a freelance writer and artistic director of the Los Angeles Film Festival.

At 12, Ansen began writing the name of every film he saw, its stars and his rating, from poor to excellent, in a lined notebook, 50 movies per page. That added up to 7,714 movies, and counting, as of October 2007, when Ansen looked back at the movies he reviewed and the history of films and the world they revealed.

In an interview about his leaving Newsweek after 31 years, Ansen said he wouldn't miss seeing and writing about all those bad pictures. (I reviewed one or two pictures a week for only 13 years, but I understand.) Judging from Newsweek's Web site, it's replaced him with other writers. As good as they might be, I doubt they have all those decades of seeing and thinking about films.

For the last few generations, we've been living in times when newness counted for more than quality. Determining newness is easy; determining quality is harder. That's the job of critics -- critics of everything from toasters to modern dance. They help us distinguish the best from the latest.

Ever since the departures of "At the Movies" and Variety's Todd McCarthy, film reviewers and bloggers have been keyboarding like crazy: Does film criticism have a future, and where -- in print, on the Web, on Tweeter, on Facebook, all of the above?

Given that this question is asked by people who, by definition, are opinionated, there is no consensus.

One side says all knowledgeable arts criticism, including film and maybe even TV, is essential for society.

"Art appreciation -- once a staple of a liberal-arts education that taught music, literature, and fine art -- derives from knowledge of a form's history and standards, not simply its newest derivations or mutations," critic Armond White, chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle, told the group at its 2010 annual awards banquet. "Only critical expertise can provide this grounding and guidance," White said.

"All opinions are not equal," he stated. "The opinion most worth disseminating is the informed opinion, based on experience and learning." Critics must not follow trends. Instead, they must "maintain cultural and emotional continuity -- a sense of mankind's personal history --in their reporting on the arts," he said.

The other side welcomes the new Web-based bursting of film criticism, whether informed or not.

Movies have always been the most democratic of arts, open to all to enjoy and opine about, without requiring academic learning. But good reviewers still need a love of movies, experience seeing many, the insight to understand them, and the skill to convey their insights clearly and concisely.

Everyday opinions had been limited to friends gathering for pizza after a film, or for office-mates to talk about the next day (hence the name of this column, "After the Show"). Though newspapers and magazines once filtered out the worst reviewers, because of the Internet, film criticism now has mobs keyboarding away. On the Web, the exceptionally democratic nature of film reviewing has been reduced to the good, bad and ugly.

For film lovers, the challenge hasn't changed, to find the few critics in his mob who provide the most useful commentary and the most revealing insights, with writing that is helpful and challenging.

Those critics sadly may not be working at local papers, but they are out there. To find them, check out sites like Rottentomatoes.com or rival Metacritic.com. They compile reviews from the best critics. Find one or two you like and stick with them for your filmgoing guidance.

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.

-- 30 --

A quiz show squeezed into a NYC cab

2010-05-21T22:03:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 494, April 11, 2010

===============================

A QUIZ SHOW SQUEEZED INTO
A NEW YORK CITY CAB?

Yes, it's Discovery Channel's 'Cash Cab,'
and it's the best-kept secret on TV

By John Greenwald

What's a cash cab? If you don't know the answer, you're missing one of the most spontaneous and joy-filled TV shows I've ever seen on TV. That may sound like excessive praise, but in comparison to the rest of TV, it's true.

How can this modest, little Discover Channel quiz show be so exceptional?

For one, the premise is so simple. Unsuspecting New Yorkers and tourists get into a yellow cab expecting a ride. Instead, once they're seated, panels of colored lights begin flashing above their heads. The driver, who's been doing a bad imitation of Robert De Niro, turns himself around to reveal a genial cabbie and host, Ben Bailey, who welcomes them to "Cash Cab," "a TV game show that takes place in my cab."

(Bailey is a stand-up comedian who had to earn a city hackers license for the show. One of its staffers rides shotgun, just out of camera range, assisting him.)

As Bailey drives them to their destination, he asks "general knowledge" questions. The longer the cab goes the harder the questions become. If passengers give three wrong answers (three strikes), they out -- literally. At the third strike, Bailey drops them right to the curb, regardless of how near or far they are from their destination.

That's basically it: questions and answers, each worth $25, $50, $100 and $200. Most people win, say, $700 to $1800, though one group won nearly $6000. (For a brief sampling of the show's questions, see box.)

To help passengers answer, there are two "shout outs": a "Mobile Shout Out" cell phone call to a family member or friend, and "Street Shout Out" to someone walking on the street outside the cab.

There are two extra credit questions. If the Cash Cab is stuck at a traffic light, the contestants get a "Red Light Challenge," a single question with multiple answers. If contestants get enough answers right in 30 seconds (usually it's four out of five), they win $250. Wrong answers don't count, only the right ones.

Finally, if the passengers successfully reach their destination, Bailey will offer them the double-or-nothing "Video Bonus Question" -- a brief video clip with a single question. The question is usually harder than the others, which is why many contestants go away with nothing but a free cab ride.

Even with those extras, "Cash Cab's" simplicity makes it stand out among all of TV's other programs -- from host-dominated home and cooking shows (Rachel Ray), to flashy, noisy quiz shows, where contestants tensely face a studio audience, and where correct answers can be worth tens of thousands ("Jeopardy" and "Millionaire").

"Cash Cab's" payoff of a month's rent is small change by comparison.
But the details of "Cash Cab," including the questions, are secondary to the people in the cab. Their shock and surprise at the colored lights flashing above them almost immediately turns to glee and often giggly delight, when they're told they're in a quiz show in a cab. Some have exclaimed, "Oh my god, you've got to be kidding" or "Only in New York."

This sets the tone of the contestants, even when it's just one person. Unlike other quiz shows, "Cash Cab's" contestants usually are friends, couples or families (I love the kids when they answer correctly). The passengers already have a relationship. Since they haven't spent hours of pre-screening, their expressions of surprise and elation continues throughout the entire cab ride, and for the rest of each show. Even when passengers lose, to be left on the street, they're smiling, and so are we.

I remember two young women, obviously good friends, who laughed and danced in place at almost every answer, right or wrong. They had such a good time, even when they earned three strikes and were booted out of the cab, they continued their impulsive dancing on the street.

Some, maybe half, of the contestants are pre-screened, sort of. Producers ask people on the street if they'd like to be on a quiz show. If they say yes, they fill out some forms, answer some trivia questions, and are told to wait for a cab to take them to a TV studio. When the cab shows up, it's the Cash Cab, of course.

But this semi-caveat does not diminish "Cash Cab's" sweet, nearly innocent delight. In the context of TV's overall blandness or violence, no wonder "Cash Cab" is TV's best-kept secret in the U.S., and in cities around the world.

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.

-- 30 --

Box:

'CASH CAB' QUESTIONS

Below is a brief sampling of "Cash Cab" questions.

For $25: What sport's main piece of equipment is known as a shuttlecock? Answer: Badminton.

For $50: Artist Henry Moore is best known for what art form? Answer: Sculpture.

For $100: The ancient city of Pompeii was buried under the ash of what volcano? Answer: Mount Vesuvius.

Red Light Challenge for $250: Name five of the six musicians who were part of the Rolling Stones? The passengers correctly named Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Charlie Watts and Ron Wood. Bill Wyman also would have correct.

Video Bonus, for $1,850 or nothing: The cab's small back-seat TV screen displayed the large, modern glass pyramid that's the entrance to the Louvre art museum in Paris. Question: Who was the Chinese-born architect who designed it? Answer: I.M. Pei.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved

When do lies add up to the truth?

2010-05-20T15:10:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 493, April 4, 2010

===============================

WHEN DO LIES ADD UP TO
THE TRUTH? IN FICTION

Storytellers must arrange lies so
convincingly we believe in every moment

By John Greenwald

The Sunday of the big vote in the U.S. House of Representative on the health reform bill, I browsed among the cable news channels. After a while, the proceedings got boring, what with all the repetitive arguments and counter-arguments, charges and counter-charges, the exaggerations, hyperbole, lies, half-truths, misstatements and mendacity.

So I surfed, eventually landing on Turner Classic Movies' presentation of the 1950 classic comedy, also about Washington, "Born Yesterday." For a 60-year-old film, it had a few oddly prescient, curiously relevant moments.

In "Born Yesterday," a New Jersey scrap dealer, played by Broderick Crawford at his most nasty and irredeemable, comes to D.C. to win government contracts. He'll browbeat, bully and even bribe lawmakers to get the deals he wants.

Near the film's end, when his plans start falling apart, Crawford's lawyer explains that most officials in Washington are decent, honest people who try to do what's best for the American people.

The moment this little speech was over, I found myself laughing out loud. If this scene were to play in a movie theater today, there would be guffaws throughout the auditorium. Audiences might have believed such idealistic sentiments in 1950, but in 2010, these ideas would be considered a pack of lies.

That one scene in one movie revealed just how large the distance had grown between our idea of public truth-telling in 1950 and in 2010: big enough to accommodate the Tea Party movement. Perhaps senators and representatives were as honest as the 1950-era lawyer said they were; certainly audiences then believed they were. Today, Americans view Congress as a collection of politically, financially and morally corrupt scoundrels. Just watch cable news and Comedy Central.

That Sunday moment also suggested a larger question: Are we surrounded by liars?

Hollywood has made a few movies about lying and liars. In "Liar Liar" (1997), Jim Carrey plays a lawyer who wakes up one morning unable to lie. Carrey demonstrated well the intense internal conflict of someone who, more than anything, wants to lie, but physically cannot.

More recently, Ricky Gervais starred in, co-wrote and co-directed "The Invention of Lying" (2009), a clever little comedy about a world where no one lies, where everyone, and everything, tells the truth. For example, retirement homes are called "A Sad Place Where Homeless Old People Come to Die." Summing up this world, film critic Roger Ebert wrote, "I wonder if politics are even possible."

In the film, Gervais is trying to comfort his dying mother. Almost out of the blue, he finds himself telling her that death doesn't mean nothingness but a magnificent afterlife instead. Given that she and everyone else believe him, soon his entire town wants to know more. So Gervais invents other fictions, especially one about the "Man in the Sky," who's in charge of everything in the world -- and who will be with them after death, making them happy. (One of writer Gervais' points is that lying gets complicated.)

We are, of course, surrounded by lies. White lies, black lies, red lies and blue lies. We tell lies to protect people's feelings, to advance our own interests and the interests of others. My favorite everyday lie is the weight loss TV commercial that says, after all its phenomenal success stories, "Results Not Typical."

The biggest lies of all, the ones that mean the most to us, that warm, comfort, entertain and inspire us, is fiction itself. From movies, to novels to paintings, from sitcoms to Shakespeare, from the Marx brothers to "Death of a Salesman," these are the lies that become the daily truths of our existence. We can't live without them. Billion-dollar industries rest on them.

The irony is that the storytellers who invent the lies of fiction also have to be sure they tell the truth. That's not an oxymoron. Fiction writers have to arrange their lies to seem truthful -- including the most fanciful ones, say in the Harry Potter films or "Avatar" (2009). Indeed, fiction's best lies reveal deeper, perhaps the deepest, truths.

I'm sure there are films that have greatly moved you, that have struck you so deeply they have never left you. That's the great challenge for storytellers -- to arrange characters that have never existed, speaking dialogue that has never been uttered, in situations that have never happened, all in a way that's completely believable.

You go into a movie knowing it's fiction, but within the first few minutes, you've been sucked into believing every frame of it. To work, this suspension of disbelief has to be exceptionally well executed. Viewers can't be rolling their eyes in disbelief over what's on the screen. No "Born Yesterday" moments, even after 60 years.

When I was a newspaper and magazine editor, I told my writers that facts are easy but truth is hard. In journalism, we can agree on the facts, but the underlying truths are problematic. Are writers arranging their facts to favor one point of view or another? Is the glass half full, half empty, or just broken?

In a world of lies, storytellers have to make up their facts and then shape them convincingly. That's a job I wouldn't wish even upon politicians.

-- 30 --

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.

Hollywood sexism, part 2

2010-04-29T22:15:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 492, March 28, 2010

===============================

HOLLYWOOD SEXISM RUNS DEEP,
BIGELOW'S OSCAR OR NOT

The percentage of women directing
movies has barely changed in 25 years

By John Greenwald

This is the second of two columns about Hollywood sexism.

In 1998, Steven Spielberg, working as a producer, picked Mimi Leder to direct an apocalypse thriller (the Earth's going to be hit by a comet), "Deep Impact" (1998). Leder had been working on NBC's "E.R." as a producer and director, but this was only her second movie. "Deep Impact" was an expensive, complicated production, with lots of special effects and some big name stars (Robert Duvall, Elijah Wood, Morgan Freeman).

Her next feature was the poorly reviewed, small-budget heist film, "The Code" 1999), followed a year later by "Pay it Forward," which barely broke even. Since then, Leder has returned to producing and directing hour-long TV shows.

Despite being anointed by Steven Spielberg and directing a highly successful, male-oriented action film, Leder's movie career has foundered for the last decade. Yes, it's that difficult for a woman director to succeed in Hollywood.

"How could a community that prides itself on its liberalism and progressivism fail so miserably?", asked Melissa Silverstein of the Women's Media Center. "Gender disparity runs rampant," she wrote in 2006. Today, little had changed -- except Kathryn Bigelow won a best director Oscar, the first for a woman.

Otherwise, the numbers for women in Hollywood are chilling.

In 2009, women made up 16% of all senior people making the industry's top 250 highest grossing movies: directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers and editors, according to Prof. Martha M. Lauzen, executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State.

That's a drop of 3 percentage points from 2001, and equals 2008's numbers.

Of directors, women were just 7%, in 2009, Lauzen reported, a drop of 2 percentage points from 2008. The 2009 percentage of women directors was the same way back in 1987.

The proportion the 250 top films directed by women has been roughly the same for 25 years, 7 to 9%, Lauzen said. "We're running in place. There's been no progress since 1987."

These numbers reveal some harsh truths about the picture business: The overall majority of movies are made for males in their teens and 20s. Action, gross-out comedies, thrillers, horror, cops, war and superheroes. That market also determines who directs the movies.

Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" is a war film that focuses exclusively on men. Indeed, all of her films have been actioners of one kind or another, including her excellent cop thriller, "Blue Steel" (1989), which starred Jamie Lee Curtis. That's why many in Hollywood think she's an outsider, wrote Rachel Abramowitz in the Los Angeles Times. A woman doing a man's job.

The industry's sexism even includes speaking parts. Actresses were cast in only 29.9% of 4,379 roles in the 100 top-grossing films of 2007, reports Stacy L. Smith, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communications & Journalism.

When women were directors, female characters rose to as high as 44.6%, compared with 29.3% when the director was a man. Still, the percentage of women characters "hasn't changed since the 1940s. It's disheartening at best," Smith told the L.A. Times. She also discovered that women tended to be "eye-candy," more likely to be wearing scanty clothing (27% vs. 4.6% for men), or displaying mild nudity, such as cleavage or thighs (21.8% vs. 6.6% for men).

Behind these awful numbers are equally depressing stories of what women must put up with in the supposedly liberal film industry.

Catherine Hardwicke, who launched the launch the successful "Twilight" franchise ($385 million worldwide), has had trouble getting her next film going, she told the Times. "One producer was candid enough to say 'We want to go to a guy,'" she said. "Other times you just feel it by the questions they ask you. ... A lot of people think that women can't do [special] effects. That was my first job when I came to Hollywood, working in an effects house!"

Women directors have sidestepped Hollywood sexism by making "women" pictures. "Most female directors have risen to power by directing (and often writing) films that appeal to women, whether or not that's their natural inclination," the Times' Abramowitz wrote.

In recent years, women audiences have made "women" pictures hits at the box office, witness "It's Complicated" (2009), written and directed by Nancy Meyers; "Julie & Julia," (2009), written and directed by Nora Ephron; and Anne Fletcher, director of "27 Dresses" (2008) and "The Proposal" (2009).

Still, women have much to overcome.

Martha Coolidge, director of "Rambling Rose" (1991) and the first woman president of the Directors Guild of America, told Britian's Guardian newspaper of the female president of a major studio who said, "no woman over 40 could possibly have the stamina to direct a feature film. ... [Films are] too big, too tough for a female director."

"The worst," Coolidge said, "was when my agent sent another woman director in for an interview, and afterwards the guy called up and said, 'Never send anyone again who I wouldn't want to [obscenity deleted].'"

Jane Campion (1993's "The Piano") told the Guardian that women directors must develop a thick skin. "My suspicion is that women aren't used to that. They must put on their coats of armor and get going."

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved

Hollywood and women directors, part 1

2010-04-17T22:00:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 491, March 21, 2010

===============================

HOLLYWOOD'S PREJUDICE

AGAINST WOMEN DIRECTORS

Kathryn Bigelow's best director Oscar
win doesn't mean it's a new day in L.A.

By John Greenwald

This is the first of two columns.

Why has the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences taken 82 years to award its best director statuette to a woman, Kathryn Bigelow, for "The Hurt Locker" (2009)?

Was it because the 6,000-plus members of the Academy are sexist bigots? Or because the film industry itself employs so few women directors -- 13 percent, according to the Director's Guild -- that there are too few women to chose from? The academy isn't prejudiced against women directors. It's the entire film industry.

Not that Hollywood has - usually as writers and film editors -- usually as writers and film editors. Today, women are involved in just about every aspect of filmmaking, including behind-the-scene roles -- except as directors of photography. Of 2007's 250 top grossing films, women shot only 2 percent.

Movies have always been a man's business, from the men who run the conglomerates that finance and oversee the studios, to the electricians and gaffers who do the heavy lifting on the sets. Movie credits always list a "best boy," who helps set up the lighting and other electric equipment on a set. There's also a "script girl," though none of these job titles necessarily reflect the age or sex of the people who hold them.

There are two reasons so few women direct, neither pretty.

First, it's men who put up the money to make pictures, and it's not small change. A "modest" Hollywood production like "The Blind Side" (2009) cost $29 million to make (plus marketing and distribution). "Avatar" (2009), one of the most expensive films ever made, cost $237 million.

Investors can put the same amount into a new software company with a reasonable idea of how much profit it will make, and when. But, as most everyone in Hollywood will tell you, every movie is a crapshoot; and more pictures lose money than make money.

In that high-stakes context, men are more likely to invest with people they can relate to -- other men. True, in recent years, women have been production chiefs at some of Hollywood's six major studios. In 2005, women ran four. But this year, that number dropped to two, according to the Women's Media Center, and those women all reported to a male boss.

Second, when investors meet with the key people who are going to spend their tens of millions, most important is the director, after the studio chief. Directors are like military generals, but few of them have to contend with a film director's endless decisions, details and problems.

A director heads the creative and production team for a movie 24/7 for a year or longer. They work with the writer on the script, spend three or four months shooting on sets or on location, more months supervising the editing, the sound, the special effects common to almost all films today, and the music and marketing. Plus, the actors.

Many people, including a few female studio bosses, don't think women don't have the physical stamina, obsession, ambition, leadership skills and armor-plated ego to carry all that off.

Against this prejudice is the fact that women have long been directing -- documentaries. By some estimates, half of all recent documentaries have had women at the helm. Few ever make it to the big screen, because most never get theatrical release. But you can see them on cable TV, especially HBO, and on PBS.

Sheila Nevins, president of documentary and family programming for HBO and Cinemax, is perhaps the person most responsible for employing female film directors. She's overseen nearly 500 documentaries. They've earned nine Oscars, 13 primetime Emmys, 22 news and documentary Emmys and 18 George Foster Peabody awards.

But if women have mastered documentaries, what's the outlook for another Kathryn Bigelow? Not good. Next week's column will explain why.

--------------------

WOMEN DIRECTORS WHO ALSO
SHOULD HAVE WON AN OSCAR

In his MTV blog, Josh Wigler, lists five female directors who also deserved an Oscar, in addition to Kathryn Bigelow. Here's his list, with some comments of my own. -- John Greenwald

* Amy Heckerling for "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982). Not only "because it's a terrific film," Wigler writes, but "because of the insane amount of budding talent in the picture. In many ways, this was the birthing ground for icons such as Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage, Forest Whitaker, Cameron Crowe and more. Heckerling's eye for talent makes her worthy of a retroactive award."

* Penny Marshall for "Big" (1988). All the films in Wigler's list are independent and off-beat, except for this major studio production, which proves a woman can handle it. It was also Tom Hank's first great performance, and made his career. "The iconic piano scene ... has Oscar written all over it," Wigler writes.

* Kimberly Peirce for "Boys Don't Cry" (1999). Hilary Swank won best actress and Chloe Sevigny was nominated for best supporting actress. But the Academy passed over Peirce.

* Mary Harron for "American Psycho" (2000). This deeply troubling film may have been too much for the Academy's mainly conservative voters. But that's why Harron deserved to win.

* Sofia Coppola for "Lost in Translation" (2003). Coppola's brilliant, touching character study about two people lost in the uncertainty of their separate lives won for her original screenplay, though she did receive a best director nomination.

----------------

-- 30 --

Passing of 2-D, coming of 3-D

2010-04-17T21:27:00.000-07:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 490, March 14, 2010

===============================

THE PASSING OF 2-D FILMS
AND THE COMING OF 3-D

This year's Oscars have gone to 'The Hurt
Locker,' but the future belongs to 'Avatar'

By John Greenwald

A generation from now how will "The Hurt Locker" and "Avatar," the two top contenders for the 2010 best picture Oscar, be remembered.

"The Hurt Locker" will be known for two things: It's the first film directed by a woman to receive the best director Academy Award; and it's the lowest grossing movie ever named best picture.

Hollywood's big studios have ignored women as directors, even those studios run by women. With so few women directing, Academy members had equally few chances to name one best director.

When women do direct, they helm independent films. The money for them comes from small studios or independent financiers. That's why they have small budgets: no fancy sets, no big casts, no expensive computer special effects, and no big-name stars to draw in audiences (the biggest names in "Hurt Locker" are Ralph Fiennes, David Morse and Guy Pearce, who all play small roles).

Independent films aren't necessarily crowd pleasers, which means the studios that market and distribute them may not see even a small profit. "Hurt Locker" was made without a distributor. Its investors took a gamble they'd find one, if only to cover their investment.

There's an even bigger reason for "Hurt Locker's" small take at the box office: its content.

Few people have seen it or will want to -- despite its Oscar-winning qualities (awards for best picture, best director, best film editor, best sound and sound editing, best original screenplay; and nominations for best actor, best cinematography and best original score).

The point of "Hurt Locker" is to put audiences into the Iraq war, to experience where nothing is safe for American soldiers or Iraqis. It intensely focuses on an Army three-man bomb disposal unit in 2004. The GIs have to delicately defuse bombs the enemy buried under a street; or inside garbage on a street; or in the trunk of a car; or implanted in the torso of a recently killed boy; or locked around an Iraqi man.

Each bomb or array of bombs has a trigger. Some are on the bomb, others many feet away, often connected to the explosives by wires buried under the street. Or the trigger is in a cell phone held by a nearby Iraqi. The bomb disposal soldiers have to defuse bombs often not knowing how or when it'll go off. Failing in their mission means these GIs face maiming and death.

"The Hurt Locker" is among the most tense, most anxiety ridden films I have ever seen, especially as I got to know the bomb disposal soldiers. Watching, I felt as if a hand had thrust its way into my stomach and was violently twisting my viscera, again and again. Not a pleasant experience, but one director Kathryn Bigelow wanted audiences to know. Her intent wasn't to gross out audiences but to have them feel what it's like to be in this war of Improvised Explosive Devices.

And how it affects the soldiers. The film opens with a quote from war correspondent and author Chris Hedges: "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug."

All this makes for a movie, however unpleasant, that deserves all its Oscars. But will "The Hurt Locker" be much remembered in a generation by movie lovers and filmmakers? I think not, except perhaps as the last great 2-D motion picture.

Yes, there will be other great 2-D movies. But appearing in the year of "Avatar," the other main contender for the best-picture Oscar, "The Hurt Locker" marks the passing of the torch between two different kinds of film, 2-D and 3-D.

In "Avatar," writer-director-producer James Cameron, and his armies of collaborators, bring 3-D filmmaking, story telling and character development to new levels. They also mastered the integration of computer graphics to create believable humanoids and an entire world of imagined, surreal animals, flowers, mountains, grass and ground. Plus, gigantic military gear and mercenary troops from Earth.

When the movie industry first began using sound, spoken dialogue, color and computer graphics, it took some years before filmmakers fully mastered those innovations. In time, those new technologies changed films' content as filmmakers discovered new ways to tell stories and create evocative and unique worlds for them.

That's what Cameron has done in "Avatar." His overarching theme is the unity of all creatures in this far away moon called Pandora. His visionary use of 3-D brings us far closer into this alien and wondrous world than the "Hurt Locker" does in its 2-D world.

From the beginning, Cameron created "Avatar" with 3-D in mind. His story, characters and theme wouldn't work without 3-D. He had to put us in the middle of Pandora, in all its dimensions.

A generation from now, filmmakers and film historians will be studying "Avatar" to examine how Cameron used 3-D to advance the art of the film. Equally, a new generation will be seeing "Avatar" on wall-sized 3-D TV screens just to enjoy its imagination, visual beauty, love story and thrilling action. They'll be amazed, even for such an old movie.

"The Hurt Locker" is like a train from the past; "Avatar" like a rocket rushing to the future. In 2010, they passed in the night.

-- 30 --

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net. Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

Hollywood junk-movie season

2010-04-17T21:07:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 489, March 7, 2010

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HOLLYWOOD'S PRE-OSCAR
SEASON OF JUNK MOVIES

For two months, the film industry releases
only its worse pictures. Why is that?

By John Greenwald

Thank goodness, the Oscars are tonight (ABC, 8:30-11:30 p.m.). I'm elated for more reasons than the broadcast itself, though I'm one of those who feel that, at three hours, the show could be 30 minutes longer.

The Oscars mean the two-month long dearth of major, new Hollywood releases is over. For those months, the studios release few films of quality or even high entertainment value. They give us the leftovers, the also-rans, the movies worthy of the direct-to-video bins, not the big screen.

The industry thinks filmgoers stay home between January and early March. Once we've seen the best leftover Thanksgiving and Christmas films, we're going to drive under the covers and not come out until the weekend after the Oscars. <>

Not true.

Yes, during the winter months parts of the country, like New England, may be snowed in or frozen over for a few weeks, and therefore disinclined to check out the local multiplex. And huddled at home, more and more Americans see movies on DVD, or from their cable company or through the Internet. (Also, every four years, the winter Olympics keep people at home).

However, the rest of the country, where most Americans live, basks in warm, bright sunlight, low humidity and little rain. Perfect filmgoing weather, if only there were some movies worth seeing. Wedded to the old winter way of doing business, Hollywood holds off releasing good films until its spring season, which in its calendar year begins the weekend of and after the Oscars.

Let's do a new movie head count. For February 2010, the industry released 13 films -- mostly genre and clichéd pictures. But this month, March, it has or is scheduled to put in theaters 27 movies, 50 percent more, according to movieinsider.com.

Only two February films stood out: Shutter Island," Martin Scorsese's dark psychological thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio; and Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer," a thriller about British politics, deadly international games, and mysterious black sedans.

"Ghost" is essentially an independent film despite its modestly well-known cast (Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan and Kim Cattrall). But "Shutter" say big Hollywood production. Scorsese is a star director, DiCaprio a megastar actor. Still, neither has been a monster draw at the box office. In fact, "Shutter" was their biggest opening weekend hit, taking $41 million.

"Shutter" is doing so well because of a major gamble its distributor, Paramount Pictures, took. The film had been set for an October 2009 release. But Paramount thought it had a better a chance for box success during these lean, pre-Oscar months, especially when there was little worthy competition at the multiplexes. Paramount also used the Vancouver Olympics to advantage. It placed a wide variety of commercials during the games' first week.

The gamble worked. Hungry to see a movie, with little else to see, and lured by well-made commercials, audiences came.

"For an R-rated thriller, in February, to open this big, it's hard to recall anything like it," Steve Siskind, Paramount's worldwide marketing v.p. told the New York Times. These commercials got TV viewers to talk about "Shutter," and then see it, the Times reported.

But this good news for Paramount has to be seen in the context of Hollywood's pre-Oscar junk film months. Typical are the two movies that opened in my neighborhood last weekend, the one immediately before the Oscars: "The Crazies" and "Cop Out." Both are genre films, which means they don't have to very good or original at what they do. They just have appeal to fans of their respective genres.

"The Crazies," a remake of George A. Romero's 1973 film, concerns a town being taken over by murderous, deformed "crazies." It's been half-praised as little more than a well-executed grade-B horror film, but one with touches of humor and irony (the military brought in to fight the crazies are just as crazy).

"Cop Out," directed by alt-film director Kevin Smith (1994's "Clerks," 2008's "Zack and Miri Make a Porno"), stars Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan. Full of poop jokes, clichéd cop buddy humor and bad filmmaking all around, it's been condemned in Rottentomatoes.com's top critics survey -- a mere 21 points out of a possible 100.

The only February film I saw, as much by accident as anything else, was "Valentine's Day," a limp romantic comedy. It was so overfilled with characters to be confusing at first and plain tiring by the final fade out. The script has 16 major characters, give or take. Most depend on the actors to make them interesting, but few have more than seven or eight minutes on screen to grab and keep our attention, especially as they're running around in half a romantic panic.

The cast ranges from hot young actors, such as Jessica Alba, Ashton Kutcher and Ashton Kutcher, to a few seniors, such as Shirley MacLaine and Hector Elizondo. The audience was mainly tweens and pre-tweens, who oohed and giggled appropriately, when they weren't texting or leaving halfway through. Veteran director Garry Marshall (2001's "The Princess Diaries") can hardly keep up with the goings on.

Faced with those kinds of films, no wonder I can't wait for the Oscars and for the good-movie months to begin.

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved

3-D: One D Too Many

2010-04-03T19:20:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 488, Feb. 28, 2010

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ONE MOVIE DIMENSION TOO MANY

Too many 3-D films, not enough good ones,
and too few 3-D theaters to see them

By John Greenwald

Enough with 3-D already!

It doesn't matter that a minority of filmgoers have yet to see a 3-D movie. Soon it will seem that the only hot new pictures out there will be 3-D ones, and I doubt if most will be worth the extra expense to make or to see.

Hollywood has a way of ruining a good thing.

When sound first came in the late 1920s, the studios produced a number of "All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing!" movies. They were Broadway revues -- a collection of musical numbers strung together with vaudeville comedy acts. Directors shot them from roughly fifth row center in a theater.

At first moviegoers found these pictures exciting, but the thrill didn't last long. They soon saw how stilted and boring they were. Movie musicals became a drug on the market.

Dance director Busby Berkeley single-handedly saved the musical by putting the camera in the middle of the chorus line and by his outrageous sets and staging. With films like "Footlight Parade" (1933), he made musicals cinematic and popular.

Hollywood had to learn similar lessons with other new technologies. Early full-color films were too garish. And watching early wide screen movies was like watching a tennis match from center court.

In the early 1950s, Hollywood tried out 3-D, a gimmick to fight what TV and the new suburban lifestyle was doing to the picture business -- killing attendance. 3-D, which never really worked (Hitchcock tried and failed with "Dial for Murder" in 1954), gave way to the three screens of Cinerama, the almost as wide Cinemascope and today's standard wide-screen and really big-screen IMAX.

In the last few years, new, vastly improved 3-D films have sprouted, thanks to hugely superior digital technology. In "Avatar" (2009), brilliant writer-director James Cameron revealed just how amazing and visionary 3-D could be.

But the studios, with their predictable excess, can easily ruin 3-D. They're seeing 3-D as more of a business than an art, and they're tripping all over themselves.

3-D has we now know it began appearing in IMAX and regular theaters in 2003 with films like Cameron's "Ghosts of the Abyss" and Robert Rodriguez's "Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over" (2003). Most were digitally animated cartoons, like "Monster House" (2006), or digitally enhanced live action pictures, like "The Polar Express" (2004.) Some also were released in IMAX and in conventional 2-D.

Soon enough, the studios learned that 3-D, especially IMAX 3-D, did much better at the box office. 3-D movies, though only in 15 percent of screens, took in a third or more at the box office. As theater owners converted more of their theaters to digital 3-D, even at $70,00 a shot, those percentages kept getting better. Simply put, more 3-D, more profits.

Then there's "Avatar," filling up the houses for weeks, including sold out IMAX ones: $2.4 billion in worldwide ticket sales and counting, the highest grossing film ever, according to the AP.

So the push is on to convert more theaters to 3-D, and to make more 3-D films to fill them. Even IMAX got into the act, creating mini-IMAX screens at local multiplexes. The large IMAX screen measures 76 feet high by 97 feet wide, but the mini-IMAX screen is 28 feet by 58 feet -- not only smaller but also more wide-screen and less encompassing.

By next month, there will be about 4,000 3-D screens in the U.S. and Canada. Usually, Hollywood needs twice that for a wide release. That's nowhere enough for the expected logjam of 3-D movies to be released in the next few months, says the AP.

Coming next month is Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland." In April, there's the cartoon "How to Train Your Dragon" and the live action remake "Clash of the Titans," which was hastily converted from 2-D to 3-D. That's three new 3-D films playing, plus wherever there's a demand for "Avatar" -- too many movies for too few screens. Be prepared to drive a half-hour or more to see one.

Then there's the quality issue. Cameron, who's the world's leading expert on 3-D, believes Hollywood is pushing filmmakers to make 3-D movies whether they want to or not.

Audiences are not accepting inferior 3-D, "which is good," he told MTV. "But it's typical of Hollywood getting it wrong, right? We do a film that's natively authored in 3-D, shot in 3-D, so they assume from the success of that, that they can just turn movies into 3-D in eight weeks . . . and that's going to work somehow."

Will the new 3-D version of "Clash of the Titans" work?

"It's just not the way to do it. If you want to make a movie in 3-D, make the movie in 3-D! It should be a filmmaker-driven process, not a studio-driven process," he says. "This is a whole new way to paint, a whole new set of colors," he says. But 3-D is "getting crammed down from above, and people are getting told to make movies in 3-D, and it should've been the other way around."

Audiences also are stuck. Too many 3-D movies, not enough theaters to show them, and not all worthy of being in 3-D.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.. Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.

Ketching: 'At the Movies,' weathercasts

2010-04-03T18:30:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 487, Feb. 23, 2010

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THE KVETCH RETURNS WITH
TWO MORE TV COMPLAINTS

'At the Movies' still has two male critics.
Why? Also, what's wrong with TV weathercasts.

By John Greenwald

I'm still in a complaining mood left over from last week. So today, it's sexism on "At the Movies" and over-hyped TV weathercasts.

THE BOY'S ONLY CRITICS CLUB: Remember the movie review TV show hosted by two newspaper writers from Chicago, "Siskel and Ebert at the Movies"? It lasted under various names for 23 years through 1999, when Gene died tragically of brain cancer.

Siskel and Roger Ebert ran a first class program. Their reviews were insightful, well thought out and articulate, though their disagreements could become intense. Sometimes I thought they actually hated each other.

After Siskel died, Ebert and the show's producers ran through 30 guest co-hosts until they selected Richard Roeper, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. Ebert and Roeper were okay, though without the sparks of Ebert and Siskel. Ebert later said he couldn't pick a woman as co-host because he wouldn't be able to disagree with a woman as with a man. Someone must have used a heavy club to beat such sensitivities into him as a child.

Sadly, Ebert was struck with thyroid cancer in 2002. He stayed with the reamed "At the Movies" as best he could, despite many surgeries and the partial removal of his salivary glands. But in mid-2006, sections of his lower jaw were removed after doctors found cancer there. Today, Ebert can't talk, drink or eat, but he sees plenty of movies, goes to film festivals, and writes about them all for his paper, the Chicago Sun-Times, and his Web site. He also Twitters.

Ebert ended his relationship with Disney-ABC, which owns the show. However, he and Siskel's estate own the program's original "Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down" rating device. Roeper continued gamely through a series of co-hosts until he left the show in 2008. Disney-ABC re-cast it with Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune and A.O. Scott of the New York Times.

The show hasn't changed much since it began on Chicago Public Television in 1979. Two guys reviewing films. Gone is "Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down." The show's producers say they've "moved on," according to its Wikipedia entry. Instead, we have "See It," "Skip It" and "Rent It." The balcony set is gone, too, replaced by comfy chairs.

Why all this history, given that the central point of "At the Movies" has been maintained: intelligent, informed, brief movie reviews by lucid critics?

We still have two men opining about motion pictures.

A man and a woman would have been better. A woman would have brought a different perspective to the films and a wider dimension to the show. Men and women may be equal, but they're not the same. There are enough fine women film critics writing today to fill one of "At the Movies'" chairs. Maybe they're not reviewing for a newspaper, but they're appearing on an established Web site like Slate or Salon, or they're blogging under their own Internet shingle. They are out there.

Disney-ABC -- which is headed by a woman -- missed a major opportunity to make "At the Movies" a more appealing show, with the extra edge different sexes give. And a more relevant one.

BAD WEATHER: New Englanders can handle bad weather -- from summer heat waves to winter blizzards, and all that fast changing weather in between. But we can't handle wrong TV weather reports.

It doesn't matter if a major snowstorm is predicted but doesn't happen, or we're hit with a whopper when none is forecast. Schools may close and no snow appears, or when schools stay open only to be hit by a bad storm. Either way, it can become a major problem for parents and their children.

We freak out and get very, very angry. We blame school officials or TV weather forecasters or both for these foul-ups and our resulting inconveniences. Problem is we're not getting the real forecasts; instead, we're getting the hyped and exaggerated ones on local TV.

I follow my local weather on the Web, from my Yahoo! home page, which gets it from the Weather Channel. It delivers forecasts in a calm, "just the facts, ma'am" kind of way. No pretty young women or handsome men, thank you.

TV weather people may know their barometers and low-pressure ridges. Some may even have meteorology degrees. But I also believe they took writing, acting, speech or debate classes.

Listen to tone of voice they use to play up the urgency of their forecasts. Even when tomorrow morning's snowfall warrants only the word "messy," they deliver it with the emotional conviction of "dreadful," "horrible" or "get your mukluks out."

There's no reason to devote upwards of five minutes to a TV weathercast, especially with those expensive graphics. Who cares about some high-pressure area a thousand miles west, unless it means clearer skies and warmer temperatures in a week? I don't need a weather person or confusing charts to tell me that. The anchor or the sportscaster could read today's temps and tomorrow's forecast. However, keep the useful five-day grshic.

Why the over-hyped, over-dramatic, less-than-honest weathercast? Because that's what TV news does -- overplay the news to get ratings. And that's the subject of another column.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved. Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.

Great game, awful commercials

2010-03-31T16:12:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 486, Feb. 14, 201

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THE STUPID BOWL

Great game, awful commercials
what it says about America

By John Greenwald

I'm not a sports fan, but there's one game I watch every year -- the Super Bowl. True, I watch it less for the game than for the commercials, which are suppose to showcase the best of Madison Avenue.

This year, Super Bowl 44 was exceptionally exciting. (I refuse to attach Roman numerals to Super Bowls because they're pretentious.) SB44 drew a larger audience than any other single American telecast: 106.5 million people tuned in, compared to the 106 million who saw CBS' "M*A*S*H" in 1983. Sports events are the only broadcasts that increase in ratings; the rest of broadcast TV shrinks a littler every year.

If the game was extraordinary, the commercials weren't. Mainly, they stunk.

True enough, you can go to YouTube or Hulu on the Web to see 4-5 minutes of the game's funniest or best commercials. But those little compilations don't show the 30-40 minutes of the big show's remaining commercial dreck.

Most of these spots don't stand out of the crowd. Worse, they insult average viewers' intelligence. Despite more that a half century of trying to sell us stuff over TV, Madison Ave still relies on a boring, brutish hard sell, which makes its efforts and the products it advertises so forgettable.

According to Hulu, the TV Web site, these are viewers' most popular ads:

Doritos ("House Rules," with the overprotective kid and his mom's intimidated date); Google ("Search On," a Parisian love story told only in Google searches); Snickers' touch football game starring Betty White; Doritos, again, with the dog collaring its master; and Motorola, with actress Megan Fox sending around the world a cell phone photo of herself in a bubble bath, with deleterious and comical results.

Note the relative wit and humor of these spots, the way they circle around their subjects, instead of hitting us over the head with their hard sell. No wonder people liked them enough to see them again on Hulu or YouTube. But most Super Bowl commercials I neither liked nor remembered.

However, there were a few exceptions, exceptions of the "thumbs down, thumbs very down" kind.

First was the spot for the Denny's restaurant chain promoting some kind of breakfast discount. The theme was the chain was going to serve so many eggs it was freaking out vast armies of chickens. In every shot, chicken puppets would pop up screeching and screaming at the horrible prospect of laying millions of more eggs.

All I could think of was how these hens are kept in egg farms, each in its own cage, so confined it can't even turn around. No wonder they're crying in pain. This light-hearted spot had turned into a sick, sadist joke.

I'm no tree-hugging PETA fan, but I was so upset I couldn't remember what Denny's deal was. A free breakfast the third Tuesday in every month with an R, or some such?

More distressing was the commercial for the eco-friendly Audi. Platoons of eco cops were arresting environmentally unfriendly suburbanites for such crimes as using incandescent light bulbs or Styrofoam coffee cups. Instead of being a series funny exaggerations, the ad became a frightening depiction of fascist storm troopers dressed in green instead of SS black. I suspect those opposed to environmentalism will use this commercial to illustrate "eco-nazism."

Advertising like this begins with smart, creative people impressed with their own ideas to the exclusion of serving their clients' needs and everyday common sense. The ad people get so caught up with their imagined cleverness, they end up being plain stupid and wasting literally millions of dollars (nearly $2.9 million to buy the advertising time for each commercial, plus the cost of creating each one).

There's also a larger problem behind the ad business' inflated sense of self: its low opinion of the American public. Just look at the average run of TV ads. Their makers must think we're idiots, no brighter than the average clucking chicken.

Maybe it's the economy, but marketers think all we want to buy is car insurance and medications for flu and colds (and hay fever in the summer), and for depression and erectile dysfunction. We're either scared or sick, or scared of being sick.

No wonder audiences have deserted broadcast TV for cable, which has far fewer ads, or for premium cable, which has none. Or to cable's OnDemand feature, again with fewer commercials and the remote that can fast forward past the remainder. Ditto, to DVRs and TiVos, with their blessed "ff."

Years ago, I argued in this space that television was killing its own golden goose. For two generations it was hauling in outsized profits, especially by exploiting the commercial. A half-hour sitcom has only 22 minutes of programming; the other eight are reserved for advertising.

More and shorter commercials overstuff available time and clog the mind. So many are shoveled into commercial breaks that the same ones have to be repeated again and again and again before they register with viewers. And when they do register, do we appreciate their humor and story telling? Or do we think about them with annoyance, if not disgust, at both the sales pitch and the product they're selling?

-- 30 --

Too many digital choices

2010-03-31T15:44:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 485, Feb. 7, 2010

===============================

OUR DIGITAL ERA ASSAULTS US
WITH TOO MANY CHOICES

Even a multimedia junkie like me is
overwhelmed by today's over-abundance

By John Greenwald

I'm a media junkie. Not just the news media but almost all media: movies, music, television, comics and fine art, and more. Thanks to modern digital technology, this media is easy to come by. I consume most of it without leaving home.

Having all this media so close by is exciting and informative. And often a joy. But it's also overwhelming and exhausting. Indeed, being exhausted from media overload is a sign you're living in the 21st century, like it or not. (Thank goodness, I don't Facebook or Twitter or I'd be even more overwhelmed.)

Which leads to the question: Is all this media -- the news and opinion, movies and music, centuries of art and decades of comics, this overpowering, historic era of human expression, communication and energy, now at our fingertips -- is it a good thing?

I don't want to sound like a multimedia Luddite, but this question is worth considering given we're well into this new digital century.

Take my favorite non-print medium -- movies. When your grandparents were young, the only way to see a film was in a movie theater. Today, they and we can see movies on television (mainly on cable); on DVDs; and through downloads to your computer, smart phones and other digital devices.

The film rental service Netflix has more than 100,000 titles in its ever-growing library to mail to its 12 million subscribers. Others, such as Blockbuster, Amazon and Vudu, have upwards of 20,000 titles to zap directly to your home computer or TV set.

Actually, zap may not be the best word.

Getting movies from a Web-based supplier to your TV requires a good local Internet connection and transmission speed, followed by a major commitment (read expensive) of hardware (TV monitor, multi-channel sound system) in your home.

Next, do you want the movies, TV shows and on-line videos to go to your computer and then your TV? Or, directly to your TV, which requires yet another box to be put next your cable box, old VHS player and newer DVD or Blu-ray disc player. Note: Blu-ray and some video game players can be plugged directly into the Web at one end and your TV or your home theater system at the other end.

Complicated, but in the end rewarding.

However, watching movies in the comfort of your own home theater, with all the extraordinary choices that suggests, may seem a little second rate compared to seeing movies on the road. Every few weeks, manufacturers come out with new gizmos for watching movies everywhere but home. They're call notebook and netbook PCs; or smartbooks, like Apple's new iPad, which squeezes a wireless computer into an object roughly the size of Time magazine; and smartphones and cell phones.

The technologists have yet shrink computers to the size of a wristwatch, a la Dick Tracy, but I'm sure that's coming.

These examples illustrate how today's media assault depends on digital technology. Most of the movies on cable or from services like Netflix are mediocre, at best. Scroll through your cable movie guides -- the majority of pictures receive just two-star ratings.

This glut of movies and videos isn't all boring dreck. YouTube, where people post their homemade videos, has at least a few thousand worth seeing among its hundreds of thousands.

One of my favorites is "Feed Me Bubbe," where an 83-year-old grandmother demonstrates how to cook kosher recipes. The show, produced by her grandson, is simple, informative, charming and delicious. In the three years bubbe (Yiddish word for grandmother) has been on YouTube, she's become a modest worldwide phenomenon, with a Website that includes a store and a question and answer and column. "I didn't even know what an e-mail was," bubbe told the Boston Globe.

There are scores of new media we didn't have a decade ago, such as Websites, blogs, Facebook and Twitter. We can follow celebrities (Paris Hilton) and politicians (Sarah Palin) on Facebook or Twitter. A generation ago, someone like Palin might have might have disappeared into obscurity after an aborted term as a governor. But Palin keeps herself in the public eye between speeches by posting her thoughts on her Facebook page.

However, this new media can turn negative, if not treacherous.

In a middle-class suburb of Boston, a high schooler set up a Facebook event invitation entitled "kill all gay people yea." Some 17 people, including nine from the local high school, signed up to "attend." The town was outraged; the boy was disciplined; no such event took place.

But as the local paper reported, "Facebook has disabled posts in the past that violated taste standards, including some posts that claimed the Holocaust never happened, as well as a poll about killing President Obama."

Our new media world has become an infinite newsstand of everything from brilliant movies to dangerous ideas and opinions. When newsstands were real, not metaphors, the commercial marketplace sorted out the good from the bad. Now anybody with a video camera or just typing away in their underwear can become some kind of star. There are fewer gatekeepers helping us select the good from the junk. For all the benefits of this multimedia age, we're also awash in rubbish.

---------------------

Sidebar head:

ON 'AVATAR,' CHINA CHANGES ITS MIND, TWICE

In last week's column about the urge to censor, I wrote that China was of two minds about "Avatar" (2009). It pulled the 2-D version of film in favor of the state-sponsored biopic "Confucius," who's quite the rage there now. It also renamed one of its peaks "the Avatar Hallelujah Mountain" because a Hollywood photographer shot the mountain for reference for the movie.

Not so, not so.

Despite starring the internationally famous Hong Kong star Chow Yun-fat playing Confucius, the biopic was a bomb compared to "Avatar," the New York Times reported. Theater owners across the country have pulled "Confucius" after a week, returning "Avatar" to their screens. Apparently, box office won out over politics.

Meanwhile, in Zhangjiajie [cq] in southern Hunan province, officials were to have formally changed the name of "Southern Sky Column" to "Avatar Hallelujah Mountain." But authorities now deny doing so, according to Reuters. This mountain-top contretemps pitted traditionalists against city folks wanting to turn Zhangjiajie into a capitalist tourist trap. Sound familiar? -- John Greenwald

-- 30 --

'Eli' and 'Avatar' and blasphemy

2010-02-24T20:13:00.000-08:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 484, Jan. 31, 2010

===============================

PARALLELS BETWEEN
CONTROVERSY AND CENSORSHIP

Debates over 'Eli' and 'Avatar' once
could have led to film blasphemy charges

By John Greenwald

Two movies currently playing have stirred up storms of controversy, "The Book of Eli" (2010) and "Avatar" (2009). In the past, such debates could have meant the censors' scissors.

The Week magazine summarizes "Eli's" plot and controversies best: "In [this] post-Apocalyptic biblical thriller, ... Denzel Washington plays a blind man who feels he's been called by God to carry the last remaining copy of the Bible across the country. Is 'Eli' an engrossing tale about the power of faith, or a cartoonish, exploitative distortion of Christianity?" The Week offers quotes from both sides.

James Cameron's 3-D billion-dollar blockbuster, "Avatar," takes place 150 years in the future on a faraway moon. Mercenary imperialists from Earth have invaded Pandori to mine a rare ore. To better deal with Pandora's natives, the Earthlings combine a few people's DNA with the moon's own creatures, the 10-foot tall, humanoid na'vi.

Eventually, the Earthlings and the na'vi begin mortal combat: the Earthlings with their weaponry and technology, the na'vi with their ability to plug into Pandora itself. And with the hybrid na'vi in the middle.

With that kind of plot, it's easy to see where controversies -- especially in our riven era -- will arise.

Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote that "Avatar" is a "long apologia for pantheism -- a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world." Worse, he called pantheism "Hollywood's religion of choice for a generation now." That may, or may not, be true. But for Hollywood's last one hundred years, Christianity was its religion of choice.

There's more. In a front-page follow up, the Times detailed the arguments left, right and sideways spinning around "Avatar."

Social and political conservatives dislike its portrayals of religion and military forces. Feminists say the male na'vi are stronger and more muscular than the females. The Vatican newspaper's film critic said the movie "gets bogged down by a spiritualism linked to the worship of nature."

China's of two minds. It pulled the 2-D version of film in favor of a state-sponsored biopic about Confucius. The na'vi's revolt may remind some Chinese of their own government's repression and exploitation of local peoples. But China also renamed one of its peaks "the Avatar Hallelujah Mountain." A Hollywood photographer shot the mountain for reference for the movie in 2008.

A Chicago alderman and former Marine called the movie anti-military and anti-American. And finally, antismoking advocates want to give the movie an R-rating because the lead scientist character smokes. Not that we know what she's smoking 150 years hence, old-fashioned addictive tobacco or some new fangled harmless substance.

Not that long ago, such controversies easily could have led to government censorship.

Many states had their own censorship boards. In the early 1960s, I remember seeing "Approved by the State of Maryland" on every film I went to in Baltimore. New York State banned the short film "The Miracle" (1948) for blasphemy, until a Supreme Court in 1952 overturned that law. Still many state boards held on through the early 1980s.

From 1934 to 1968, the film industry tried to get around state-by-state censorship by instituting its own virtual censorship, the Production Code. To be released in America, all films had to meet its rigid restrictions.

But the code saw cracks in its power in the 1960s. First, a smattering of foreign films made it to American theaters without its okay. Then, the code's overseers, the Motion Picture Association of America, overruled the code's administrators after appeals by the producers of "The Pawnbroker" (1965). In 1968, the MPAA junked its one-size-fits-all code in favor of the current age-based ratings (G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17).

Still, the federal government continues to try its hand at state-sponsored censorship through fines of broadcast radio and television owners for what it calls indecent or sexual images and speech. It's levied fines in the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars against broadcasters for tasteless stunts by radio shock jocks, occasional expletives uttered by musicians in award shows and that famous quarter-second of Janet Jackson's exposed right breast. Wisely, the FCC keeps hands off political speech, mainly talk radio shows, despite their occasional moments of hatefulness.

Censorship, of one kind or another, continues to be an issue in the United States and around the world. Who knows which country will use scissors to trim "Eli" or "Avatar" because of the issues I've mentioned? China, Iran and others censor Web and personal networking sites, search engines and more. U.S. legislators have urged the state department to oppose more forcefully China's limits on the Web and Google. (But one Washington legislator wants the FCC to control cable television the same way it controls over-the-air broadcasting.)

Personally, I hate government censorship, even in the form of fines. I understand, and agree with, the need to use censorship to protect children. But anything beyond that treats adults like children. Entertainers and artists have always pushed our sensibilities, usually to our benefit. Yes, there's a lot of crap out there -- just try flipping through your pay cable channels. Yet, that's the risk of living in a free society.

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.

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Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved

2009: A major tipping point for movies

2010-02-24T20:02:00.000-08:00

================================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 483, Jan. 17, 2010

===============================

2009: A MAJOR TIPPING POINT
FOR MOTION PICTURES

When Time magazine's top three movies
all are animated, films are changing

By John Greenwald

Last year, 2009, was a tipping point in the history of motion pictures.

A tipping point is an accumulation of small increments that add up to an important change. And that's what happened with movie animation in 2009. Animation became a major part of the film industry, last year. Just look at the top three films in Time magazine's top 10 for 2009. They are all animated:

1) "The Princess and the Frog," Disney's return to hand-drawn, 2-D animation;

2) "Up," Pixar's familiar computer-generated animation; and

3) "Fantastic Mr. Fox," director Wes Anderson's anti-American dream "kids" story, told in stop-action animation.

Creativity and technology merged. But there's more.

My definition of animation goes beyond "cartoony" versions of children's stories. It includes any manipulation of cinematic images. Animation can range from photographing a landscape through a shaking bowl of colored water to complicated, computerized special effects, from a kid's flip book to the epitome of digital manipulation -- writer-director James Cameron's ground-breaking, 3-D sci-fi adventure, "Avatar."

Curiously, while "Avatar" didn't make Time's 10 best for 2009, it did appear on its list of the decade's top 10, at number 10. Time's movie critic, Richard Corliss, explained the anomaly this way: "It's hard to have a decade's perspective on a picture I saw twice, just two weeks ago, and didn't feel strongly about on first viewing. But if 'Avatar' has the liberating impact on movie technology that I suspect it will, it richly deserves the last spot on this list. ... [F]or a sensational, seductive movie immersion, 'Avatar' has it all over James Cameron's last blockbuster. This one really is titanic."

As best as I can tell, 2009 was a record year for animation of one kind or another. Fully animated pictures released last year -- besides "The Princess and the Frog," "Up" and "Fantastic Mr. Fox" -- included "Monsters Vs. Aliens," "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs," "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs," "Planet 51," "9," "Astro Boy," "Ponyo" and "Coraline." There are a few more, but you get the point.

Then there are the hybrids, films using differing live-action, animation and digital techniques. Among them are "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel," which was mainly digitalized, cute chipmunks mixed in with live-action photography. Ditto for "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" and "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," "Star Trek," "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian," "Sherlock Holmes," "2012" and "District 9," among others.

"A Christmas Carol" used a technique known as motion capture: Actors are filmed in a way their images and movements can be digitally enhanced, manipulated and exaggerated to create unique fantasy characters. "Coraline" and "Fantastic Mr. Fox" used stop-action animation, in which flexible figures are manipulated frame by frame to generate the impression of movement.

Clint Eastwood has been known to brag when a film of his hasn't used digital effects. His "Invictus" was live action, except for the rugby matches played before 50,000 fans in various stadiums. No producer can afford that many extras today. So, Eastwood merged live action with digital effects to create exciting, often enthralling scenes of those rugby matches.

That all these animation techniques -- culminating in "Avatar" -- were used in a single year and in so many pictures -- that's the tipping point. Animation, especially as I've broadly defined it, has become a permanent and wide-ranging, part of filmmakers' vocabularies. Fewer and fewer major Hollywood pictures will confined to a half-dozen stars running around Manhattan or Los Angeles in search of love or running from heartache.

Writers, producers and directors will ditch those clichéd stories in favor of more adventurous feats of imagination. Yes, audiences still want to have their emotions connect with the characters on the screen; they want to be made to laugh and cry with them.

However, now our eyes can pop and our jaws can drop, especially as we're enveloped in wondrous 3-D worlds. The way fine art moved from versions of realism, to impressionism, to expressionism, to cubism, to abstractionism and beyond, movies equally can jump to new visual and storytelling modes.

We'll still have the romances, comedies and dramas we're used to, but perhaps not as many, especially the bad ones. As animation sets free filmmakers' creativity and invention, I hope to see a much wider range of movies, not just the dialogue-bound, illustrated novels, live-action comic books, and boring sequels and series that films have become.

At "Avatar's" release, James Cameron said anything a filmmaker imagines now can be realized on screen, provided there's enough money and time. As technology becomes cheaper, and as these films become better and even more popular, I expect we'll be seeing more of them. Already we've seen a dramatic increase in the number of child-friendly movies, thanks to the pioneering digital efforts of Pixar and other studios. With the success of Disney's hand-drawn, animated "Princess and the Frog," I look forward to even more such pictures.

I've always had a special affection for animated movies. Once you put actors in front of a camera lens, you've limited your creative choices, but now we're at that point where filmmakers have a free range of choices. May they be up to the challenge.

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved

2009 in review, part 2

2010-01-30T16:02:00.000-08:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 482, Jan. 10, 2010

===============================

MORE OF THE BEST MOVIES
I'VE SEEN IN 2009

From the romance of '(500) Days of Summer'
to the real-life drama of 'Invictus'

By John Greenwald

This is the last of a two-part series.

Again, this column is not "the 10 best films of 2009" you've read elsewhere. I include all the films I've seen in a given year -- in theaters, on cable TV and on DVD, new movies, recent ones and old classics. Confining myself to just one year seems rather narrow, especially when there are so many good movies made every year that are worth seeing and talking about.

However, because I'm a more of a general interest writer about movies, and not a fulltime film reviewer, I try to see only those films I might like, not the bad ones. In December, Hollywood releases so many movies that only fulltime film critics have the time to see them all. I may have missed a few of December's better offerings. If so, I'll include them next year. Finally, because of illness and injury, I didn't see all the pictures I wanted to -- but that's what DVDs are for.

All these films are on DVD, or will be soon. They're presented here in random order.

* "The Princess and the Frog" (2009): Disney brought back old fashioned hand-drawn animation, proving you don't need the tiresome, overused, excessively realistic computerized animation to be a top animated film and a big hit. An engaging African-American heroine fights for her dream of her own restaurant in 1930s New Orleans. There's black magic voodoo, an equally magical bayou, a blind bayou queen and an alligator who wants to play in a jazz band. And a frog prince. The characters and story intertwine with imagination and delight. This beautiful film is a joy.

* "Pygmalion" (1938) and "My Fair Lady" (1964): TCM put together this delightful double bill before Christmas. G.B. Shaw wrote the screenplay from his hit play, keeping the wit, burgeoning romance and social satire intact. The 1964 movie musical, taken from the hit B'way musical, was faithful to the musical and benefits from the great score and Cecil Beaton's stunning production design.

* "Invictus" (2009): A feel good, exciting drama, and deservedly so, about Nelson Mandela's attempt to unite a riven South Africa using rugby.

* "Man Push Cart" (1976) and "Chop Shop" (2007): James Cameron in "Avatar" may have used the latest 3-D and computer technology to suck you into a totally alien world. But Ramin Bahrani also sucks you into worlds -- of immigrants struggling to survive in New York. "Cart" follows a man who sells coffee and bagels from one of Manhattan's ubiquitous mobile carts. Someone steals his cart, which is about all that happens. In "Shop," a 12-year-old Puerto Rican boy directs drivers to an auto repair shop on a Queens street crowded with dozens of such shops. He outfits his small backroom for his older sister. They have of visions of owning their own taco truck. Director Bahrani uses amateur and professional actors, a well-rehearsed script and a documentary film style. But everything seems spontaneous and immediate. Both movies have no conventional story arcs. Things just happen or they don't. Because of the settings, the performances and the situations, both films have an intense honesty that few movies ever have.

* "Lightning in a Bottle" (2004): B.B. King leads top blues stars in a NYC concert. A tremendous night! The background interviews are a plus.

* "(500) Days of Summer" (2009): Off-beat romance. Less about love than growing up. Non-chronological plot and a good cast give the film an extra, entertaining edge.

* "The Thin Man" (1934): Despite an incomprehensible plot, this witty, perfectly charming crime drama succeeds at all levels.

* "Public Enemies" (2009): Slightly different crime drama. Stylish, well acted. Johnny Depp plays a caring and crazy Dillinger. Underrated film may be a little too cool for today's hot and bothered audience.

* "I Do: How to Get Married and Stay Single" (2006): It's too bad that French romantic farces seem to be a thing of the past, because "I Do" recalls how totally enjoyable and hilarious these slight entertainments can be. Here, a confirmed bachelor is brow-beaten by his mother and sisters to get married. Finally, he stops resisting and pays a young woman to fake being his fiancé. The man's family is convinced she's "the one" and would make him a perfect bride. Fast-paced, witty complications ensue.

* "The Fantastic Mr. Fox" (2009): This adult children's story is the American dream in reverse. The sly Mr. Fox wants to better his life. No more living in underground burrows, he moves his family into large tree. He gives up stealing rabbits and chickens to become a newspaper gossip columnist. But when he goes after three local human farmers, he's bitten off too much. A clever, eccentric, stop-action animated fable, "Fox" goes beyond typical children's film.

* "Where the Wild Things Are" (2009): Spike Jonze's take on Maurice Sendak's classic kids' picture book. Movie powerfully probes children's emotions (and ours) as Young Max's learns to negotiate the needs and demands of his fantasy world and fantasy characters. Max's freedoms and fear should reverberate in us all.

* "Melinda and Melinda" (2004): Woody Allen's comedy-drama has two romantic triangles with the same Melinda at the center of each. Intense, comic, though a tad unsatisfying. Still, idea-rich story and characters sustain the effort.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

2009 in review, part 1

2010-01-30T15:27:00.000-08:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 481, Jan. 3, 2010

===============================

2009 WAS THE YEAR OF THE
FUTURE OF FILMS, 'AVATAR'

But other movies from as far back as
1927 also prove the vitality of cinema

By John Greenwald

The first of a two-part series.

There's something a little phony about film critics' annual "10 best" lists. Behind these round-ups is the silent assumption that all years are alike, that the 10 best movies of, say, 2009 are as good as 1999's or 1939's. Truth is, film critics and historians consider 1939 to be Hollywood's best year ever. Films like "Gone with the Wind," "Stagecoach," "The Wizard of Oz" and "Dark Victory" are a few of the dozens of pictures released that year now deemed all-time movie classics.

That's one of the reasons I don't confine my annual "best of" columns to films released in a given year. Instead, I select from all the pictures I've seen in a specific year -- old and new, in theaters, on DVD and cable. My goal is not to prove my critical acuity but to offer you a wide-ranging roster of movies you might enjoy.

Also, since this a not a conventional film review column, I don't have to see all the movies released in a year, especially the bad ones. Instead, I just pick those I might like. I may not see all of December's releases in time to meet deadlines, but I'll catch up on the best of that bunch next year. Finally, because of illness and injury, I didn't see all the pictures I wanted to -- that's what DVDs are for.

All these films are on DVD, or will be soon. They're presented here in random order.

* "Avatar" (2009): This is the game changer -- with 3-D and performance-capture effects creating a fully believable alien world, and all its creatures. The way spoken dialogue changed silent movies in 1927, "Avatar" will change our ideas of what films can be and say. Plus, writer-director James Cameron isn't afraid to dramatize ideas about politics, morality and faith to a popular audience.

* "Bread and Tulips" (2000): Often hilarious, often moving comedy-drama. A middle-aged Italian housewife gets lost during a family outing in another city. She stays behind to find who she is. A true treat.

* "Jackie Brown" (1997) and "Inglourious Basterds" (2009): Two Quentin Tarantino films 20 years apart, both different on the surface, both individual and compelling in their own right. "Brown," from a crime novel by Elmore Leonard, is a taught, twisty crime thriller starring Pam Grier. "Basterds" is Tarantino's over-the-top WWII combat satire, with long stretches of tension-ridden conversations interrupted by violent action shootouts.

* "District 9" (2009): A spaceship filled with 8-feet tall shrimp-like aliens breaks down over Johannesburg, South Africa. Confined to a giant shantytown for 20 years, the creatures find themselves fighting the government that wants to move them across the country. This expertly made, low-budget sci-fi action thriller also touches on human and alien social and political issues.

* "Coraline" (2009) wants more attentive parents, and through a secret door she finds them. There's one hitch: Instead of eyes, they have big black buttons. Director Henry Selick's stunning stop-action film is rich with unnerving and weird imagination.

* "Frost/Nixon" (2008): Emotionally powerful character study of David Frost's post-Watergate TV interviews with ex-President Richard Nixon. An intense battle of minds and wills. Frank Langella captures Nixon's moral contradictions and self-deceptions without slipping into caricature.

* "The Exterminating Angel" (1962): In Spanish director Luis Brunel's comedy-drama, a group of society types go to a fancy home for an after-opera dinner party. For reasons never explained, they soon find they can't leave. For days, they're trapped in one room. Brunel turns a dark satire of upper-class society into a creepy metaphor for the decline of western civilization.

* "Star Trek" (2009): An imaginative prequel to the original "Trek" TV show and movies. When we first saw the key characters 40 years ago, they already were a well-oiled team. In J.J. Abrams' movie, we meet Kirk, Spock, Uhura, et al, before they even knew each other. This is how they became the sci-fi icons we now treasure. Cleverly filled with personality and outer-space special effects action.

* "Man on Wire" (2008): Smartly made documentary about Philippe Petit, who wire-walked from one World Trade Center tower to the other in 1974. Dramatically captures Petit and what's been called "the artistic crime of the century."

* "Faust" (1924): F.W. Murnau's silent version of the classic German legend. A man sells his soul to the devil. Compelling and intense -- despite its age.

* "9" (2009): Post-apocalypse sci-fi drama stars heroic hand puppets fighting "Terminator"-like machines. Visually impressive, with an intriguing fantasy plot. Not to be confused with "District 9" (see above), or with "Nine," the new musical film based on the Broadway musical drama "Nine"(1982), which in turn is based on Federico Fellini's movie "8 1/2" (1963). You need a chart to trace the lineage of these things.

* "Word Wars" (2004): This excellent documentary follows four Scrabble players to the national championships. It ingeniously combines the contestants' stories with the meanings of the words they play. <>

* "Paris, Je T'aime" (2006): 20 directors each use 5 minutes to tell a sharply focused story about love in Paris, from joyous to sad. French, American and English writers, directors and actors make this a never-boring tour through Parisian neighborhoods, personalities and romances.

This series concludes next week.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved

'Avatar' revolutionizes films

2010-01-30T14:25:00.000-08:00

================================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 480, Dec. 27, 2009

===============================

BELIEVE THE BUZZ: 'AVATAR'
REVOLUTIONIZES FILMS

Anything a filmmaker imagines now
can be put convincingly on the screen

By John Greenwald

Even before James Cameron's "Avatar" opened last weekend, the buzz out of Hollywood was the two-hour-forty-two-minute sci-fi extravaganza would revolutionize the art of the cinema.

The skeptic in me said wait until you see the movie before you subscribe to the buzz. Well, I've seen "Avatar," and the buzz is true. "Avatar" is a thrilling, wondrous experience, unlike anything I've ever seen. Critics have compared it to the first talkie, "The Jazz Singer" (1927). After first seeing (and hearing) that film, which introduced spoken dialogue and singing into feature films, audiences never looked at motion pictures the same way

In "Avatar," Cameron has created a vivid, viable world that is as believable as the Amazon rainforest or the coral reefs you see on cable nature documentaries -- but more exotic, more thrilling, more unusual and more spectacularly entertaining.

The best moments are when our hero, a crippled ex-Marine who's been turned into "native" of the earth-sized moon Pandora, first walks, crawls, jumps, climbs and almost flies in his new body in his new Pandorian environment. Instead of being trapped in a wheel chair, he's a 10-foot tall Na'vi, with long, strong legs, translucent blue skin, a feline face, pointy, wiggly ears, and a thick pony tail running below his butt (which plugs into flying four-legged "horses"). Also, he has a tail.

Some film reviewers, with their usual lack of imagination, have complained that Cameron's script suffers from being lifted from a score of movie genres and a thousand other films. All true, but noticeable only to the persnickety.

Cameron and his 2,000 co-filmmakers spent $300 million and three years on "Avatar." They put most of their creativity into Pandora, as it's being invaded by American commercial mercenaries 150 years in the future. Their mission is to extract a coal-like substance, Unobtanium (that's its name, honest!), which would restore a burned out, browned out Earth to its former green, energy rich glory.

Pandora's bow and arrow-armed natives don't want their world befouled by a species that's already ruined its own home planet. Beside, Pandora is more than sacred territory to the Na'vi. As we learn, they plug their ponytails into more than local "horses" and flying "dragons," but also into the planet itself. Pandora is a semi-unified, organized structure that communicates with itself.

But that broad overview is nothing compared to the shot-by-shot details Cameron presents. Working from sketches he began in high school, he accounts for what looks like a full Pandorian ecosystem: flora, fauna, geography, biology, neurology, religion and spirituality. Cameron even commissioned a linguist to create a language for the Na'vi.

To make this world more fully realized than any film has done before, he's advanced the computer technique of motion capture, where computers record human movements to be played with by digital animators (see this season's "The Christmas Carol"). He's added a new technology he calls performance capture to record faces when "filming" the Na'vi. No more actors wearing pounds of rubber make-up and masks. These creatures are fully expressive, convincing and engaging, right down to their teeth-baring snarl, and unlike the glassy eyed characters in, say, "The Polar Express."

Tying all this together is Cameron's special 3-D technology. As we explore Pandora and the Na'vi, Cameron weaves a total emersion effect. He uses 3-D to pull us into the screen, with great depth, from the surface of the screen to the distance, forward and back, up and down. We experience Pandora's deep forests and waterfalls, with hundreds of creatures, as the Na'vi gracefully swing from vine to vine and tree limb to tree limb. We fly alongside them, seeping and turning, rising and falling.

In an interview with PBS's Charlie Rose, Cameron said there's now nothing a filmmaker can't imagine that can't be realized on the screen, provided there's enough time and money. But there's another caveat: imagination, itself. Few filmmakers working today have the imagination to create a place like Pandora, with its awesome, intricate and stunningly rich detail.

But even Cameron falls short, with a plot, characters and themes ripped from a mess of other movies. Likely, other filmmakers will have to take what he's accomplished and incorporate those concepts into a story worthy of them. It took Hollywood four or five years to creatively work up to the promise of the first talkie in 1927. Until then, early talkies mostly were stiffly filmed Broadway plays.

I suspect it will take another five years before the rest of the film industry's creative community can catch up with what Cameron has wrought. And remember, Cameron began working on "Avatar's" script 15 years ago, then put it away because the technology wasn't up to what he imagined, and what was in his high school sketchbooks.

Still, I suspect there's a small world of filmmakers eager to learn Cameron's tricks, and to license his technology, to fit their newly expanded ideas of what film is about and what it can do. Whether they create sci-fi epics, as Cameron has done, or more intimate comedies and dramas, depends on their talents and inclinations. Whichever, there's a revolutionary new world of cinema out there thanks to James Cameron and "Avatar."

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved

More digital screens than ever before

2010-01-30T14:18:00.000-08:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 479, Dec. 20, 2009

===============================

MORE SCREENS THAN EVER,
FROM CABLE TO CELL PHONES

Plus, e-books -- for non-fiction, novels,
and full-color magazines and newspapers

By John Greenwald

During the last few weeks, I've been trying to get my head around all the changes going on in electronic media -- from "big" screen (TV) to small screen (cell phones). Truth is, it's a mad house out there, as corporations struggle to figure out their futures.

What they want is your money for products or services you always wanted, or didn't know you wanted, or are not even sure you wanted. From books on portable TV screens (e-books, such as Amazon's Kindle), to "addressable" cable channels (they find you, not the other way 'round).

So, let's hopscotch the electronic media world to see what's new.

The big news burst two months ago when Comcast, America's largest cable company, announced it was buying NBC Universal, the giant TV network and movie studio. Actually, buying isn't the best word for this awaiting-government-approval transaction. It's more like a complicated swap meet stock swap -- Comcast is offering $8 billion for a controlling 51 percent of NBCU. No matter, the result will be an oligarchical behemoth.

Comcast has more than 23 million subscribers in 39 states. Besides your cable hook-up, Comcast offers a Spanish channel, a sports channel, the E! entertainment channel, plus channels for buying movie tickets (Fandango), for exercising, style and fashion, horror movies (Fearnet), computer and video games (G4) and golf, among others. Through its cable box, you can shop and date.

Over at NBCU, you've got the broadcast network, currently number four, and its news/business channels (MSNBC, CNBC). There's Bravo, which covers food, fashion, makeovers, interior decorating, reality ("The Real Housewives of Orange County) and showbiz/art ("Inside the Actors Studio"). On Christmas Day, Universal Pictures opens the middle-aged romantic comedy "It's Complicated," starring Meryl Streep, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.

There's more, like the Universal amusement parks, but enough already.

Why did Comcast "buy" NBCU? So it could feed all those TV shows to that cable box next to your TV set. One-stop shopping, literally, for all your TV-viewing needs. And some features you don't even have to pay for, at least not yet. A few months ago, I noticed a little box popping up at the bottom of my Comcast TV screen whenever someone called me on my Comcast digital phone line, revealing who was calling. Comcast added this feature without telling me.

Comcast soon will be offering its shows to customers who get programming sent directly to their TV sets, by-passing computers.

Will this buyout affect you?

Probably yes, in the short term. To absorb the $8 billion it paid for NBCU, Comcast likely will trim some costs. Less original programming, more reruns, poorer scripts, fewer in-the-field news segments. That always happens when one corporation pays a lot for another. Quality suffers.

Let's take it down a notch, from the big TV screen to the middle-sized screen: e-books. They've been around for a decade but didn't matter much until the monster mail-order bookstore, Amazon.com, came out with Kindle. It's a computer gizmo that holds 1,500 to 3,500 titles of the 360,000 books Amazon offers. Plus, an entire panoply of newspapers and magazines. The smaller, cheaper ($259) model has a 6-inch diagonal screen; the larger, more expensive model ($489), a 9.7-inch diagonal screen. The Kindle screen features dark gray type on a light gray background. Ugh!

Meanwhile, Amazon's brick, mortar and Web-based competitor, Barnes & Noble, has a similar device, as does Sony. There are about a dozen different e-books, all more or less alike, with one exception. You can't read a Kindle book on most competitors' e-books.

Amazon sells its best-selling Kindle books for $10, which is cheaper than a paperback. Amazon freaked out the entire publishing industry when it signed Stephen Covey, author of such business-based best sellers as "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," to an exclusive one-year digital rights deal. That by-passed Covey's traditional publisher, Simon & Schuster.

But another big publisher, Random House, sent a letter to agents telling them that it believes it holds the exclusive rights to digital editions of the "vast majority" of its backlist titles. Authors, agents and publishers weren't happy, as they make more money from ink-and-paper books, even old ones, than e-books.

Meanwhile, Amazon has its own worries. Five of the nation's largest magazine publishers -- from Vogue to Time -- are planning for next year a Kindle of their own, one that would run their content on most e-book formats. The device would have full color and short videos. The publishers would get more subscriber money than Amazon now collects. Maybe newspapers aren't dead after all.

Finally, Google is planning to introduce its own cell phone next year, the Nexus One (as opposed to Nexxus, the shampoo). The hardware will be built to Google's specs and run its Android software. Unlike Apple's iPhone, which is wedded to ATT's hated wireless system, customers can go with a wireless network of their choice.

This promises to throw the cell phone industry upside down, as other manufacturers struggle to find their way between Google and Apple. For customers, this means more alternatives, normally a good thing. But as we've learned during this age of technology, the more options we have, the more confusing things become.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved

Animation grows and grows

2010-01-16T14:36:00.000-08:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 478, Dec. 6, 2009

===============================

IT'S HARD TO ESCAPE
ANIMATED MOVIES TODAY

Big-screen 'cartoons' are becoming more
grown-up; kids have more DVD choices

By John Greenwald

Who knew -- that most of the animated feature films released in the United States in 2009 did not play on the big screen but went direct to home video? Of the 27 released, 11 first appeared in movie theaters, but 16 went straight to DVD -- that's 59 percent. (See accompanying box for a list of all 27.)

We're living in a Golden Age of Animation, and it's appearing as much in video stores as the local cinema. Animation, once a minor genre, is becoming an important and growing category all by itself.

Almost all direct-to-DVD movies are aimed at children. These low-budget kid flicks often are sequels or part of series. "Barbie" has two titles this year alone. "Scooby-Doo and the Samurai Sword" is the 13th in its series of direct-to-video movies. "Pokémon: Arceus and the Jewel of Life" is number 12.

I don't belong to the demographic group that has to take children to a video store to pick out an afternoon's entertainment, or buy a title for repeated viewings. But it's clear that original children's home video has become a significant part of the film industry, though below the radar. Indeed, of 2009's 16 direct-to-DVD titles I compiled, only one was aimed exclusively at adults: "The Haunted World of El Superbeast," by Rob Zombie, the metal rocker and live action horror filmmaker.

For the American market, animated movies have to appeal to children. If producers could throw in something to adults -- say a story with grown-up appeal (most any Pixar film) or just some snappy dialogue (Eddie Murphy's mouthings in the "Shrek" films) -- so much the better, and the more financially rewarding.

There have been exceptions here and there: American science fiction, or French or Japanese art film, and of course, Japanese sci-fi, action manga, the latter available by the hundreds on Internet film catalogues. The other exceptions are action and disaster movies laden with computer-generated special effects.

The current example is "2012." Director and co-writer Roland Emmerich hasn't met a national monument -- from the Washington Monument to the Vatican and St. Peter's Basilica -- he doesn't want to destroy, which he does devastatingly in "2012," plus wide sweeps of the Earth's crust. These half-dozen sequences are as computer animated as any Pixar production; and in "2012," they're far more compelling than the human drama that's supposed to connect them.

Last weekend, three -- count'em, three -- animated films were playing at my local cineplex:

* "Planet 51." This Spanish production, features your standard fish out of water plot: a 21st century American astronaut lands on a planet whose humanlike creatures live a 1950s American lifestyle. A conventional cartoon story told with equally conventional computer animation.

* "Disney's A Christmas Carol," written and directed by Robert Zemeckis, from the oft-filmed Dickens novel. Zemeckis has long been a lover of the complicated and not fully successful computer technology called motion capture, wherein actors are filmed by computers so their images can be manipulated, twisted and exaggerated just like they were hand-drawn cartons. Making these motion-captured characters seem both embellished and realistic has been near impossible, but here Zemeckis makes it work. As the voice and visual baseline for Scrooge, Jim Carrey is perfect. (He also plays seven other characters, including all the ghosts.)

By hewing close to Dickens, Zemeckis has used this new animation technology to be exceptionally frightening, especially for children. One father told me his family liked the picture, except for his 11-year-old daughter who jumped into his lap.

* "Fantastic Mr. Fox." Director Wes Anderson's take on children's author Roald Dahl's book about an upwardly mobile fox vs. three mean local farmers. Anderson uses an old form of animation (stop action, in which highly flexible models of each character are moved and photographed frame-by-frame to make up the finished film).

But Anderson's story telling is not old fashioned. The script has a sly, sophisticated wit as Mr. Fox tries to advance himself and his family from killing chickens and living underground. George Clooney's voicing of Fox makes him one of the most interesting movie characters I've seen in years.

Opening this Friday is Disney's "The Princess and the Frog," notable for a) an African-American star, and b) Disney's return to hand-drawn, 2-D animation.

Will audiences accept a visually old-fashioned cartoon feature? Sure they will, if the story and characters are compelling. Will they accept more grown up cartoons? Yes again, judging from the early success of "Christmas Carol" and "Mr. Fox."

Whether it's movies on the big screen or direct-to-home video, animation is expanding the art of cinema, and the movie business too.

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net. For recent columns, go to www.johngreenwald.blogspot.com.

-- 30 --

2009'S ANIMATED FEATURE FILMS

Below, the 27 animated features released this year. The 16 direct-to-home video movies are marked with an asterisk (").

"9"

"Astro Boy"

"Barbie and the Three Musketeers" *

"Barbie Presents: Thumbelina" *

"Bionicle: The Legend Reborn" *

"Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs"
"A Christmas Carol"

"Fantastic Mr. Fox"

"Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder" *

"Garfield's Pet Force" *

"Green Lantern: First Flight" *

"Happily N'Ever After 2" *

"The Haunted World of El Superbeast" *

"Hulk Vs" *

"Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs"

"Monsters vs. Aliens"

"My Dog Tulip" *

"Planet 51"

"Pokémon: Arceus and the Jewel of Life" *
<> "The Princess and the Frog" <>

"Scooby-Doo and the Samurai Sword" *

"Superman/Batman: Public Enemies" *

"Tinker Bell: North of Neverland" *

"Up" (US)

"The Velveteen Rabbit"

"Wonder Woman" *

Sources: Wikipedia com, IMDb.com

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved

Animation grows and grows

2010-01-16T14:33:00.000-08:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 478, Dec. 6, 2009

===============================

IT'S HARD TO ESCAPE
ANIMATED MOVIES TODAY

Big-screen 'cartoons' are becoming more
grown-up; kids have more DVD choices

By John Greenwald

Who knew -- that most of the animated feature films released in the United States in 2009 did not play on the big screen but went direct to home video? Of the 27 released, 11 first appeared in movie theaters, but 16 went straight to DVD -- that's 59 percent. (See accompanying box for a list of all 27.)

We're living in a Golden Age of Animation, and it's appearing as much in video stores as the local cinema. Animation, once a minor genre, is becoming an important and growing category all by itself.

Almost all direct-to-DVD movies are aimed at children. These low-budget kid flicks often are sequels or part of series. "Barbie" has two titles this year alone. "Scooby-Doo and the Samurai Sword" is the 13th in its series of direct-to-video movies. "Pokémon: Arceus and the Jewel of Life" is number 12.

I don't belong to the demographic group that has to take children to a video store to pick out an afternoon's entertainment, or buy a title for repeated viewings. But it's clear that original children's home video has become a significant part of the film industry, though below the radar. Indeed, of 2009's 16 direct-to-DVD titles I compiled, only one was aimed exclusively at adults: "The Haunted World of El Superbeast," by Rob Zombie, the metal rocker and live action horror filmmaker.

For the American market, animated movies have to appeal to children. If producers could throw in something to adults -- say a story with grown-up appeal (most any Pixar film) or just some snappy dialogue (Eddie Murphy's mouthings in the "Shrek" films) -- so much the better, and the more financially rewarding.

There have been exceptions here and there: American science fiction, or French or Japanese art film, and of course, Japanese sci-fi, action manga, the latter available by the hundreds on Internet film catalogues. The other exceptions are action and disaster movies laden with computer-generated special effects.

The current example is "2012." Director and co-writer Roland Emmerich hasn't met a national monument -- from the Washington Monument to the Vatican and St. Peter's Basilica -- he doesn't want to destroy, which he does devastatingly in "2012," plus wide sweeps of the Earth's crust. These half-dozen sequences are as computer animated as any Pixar production; and in "2012," they're far more compelling than the human drama that's supposed to connect them.

Last weekend, three -- count'em, three -- animated films were playing at my local cineplex:

* "Planet 51." This Spanish production, features your standard fish out of water plot: a 21st century American astronaut lands on a planet whose humanlike creatures live a 1950s American lifestyle. A conventional cartoon story told with equally conventional computer animation.

* "Disney's A Christmas Carol," written and directed by Robert Zemeckis, from the oft-filmed Dickens novel. Zemeckis has long been a lover of the complicated and not fully successful computer technology called motion capture, wherein actors are filmed by computers so their images can be manipulated, twisted and exaggerated just like they were hand-drawn cartons. Making these motion-captured characters seem both embellished and realistic has been near impossible, but here Zemeckis makes it work. As the voice and visual baseline for Scrooge, Jim Carrey is perfect. (He also plays seven other characters, including all the ghosts.)

By hewing close to Dickens, Zemeckis has used this new animation technology to be exceptionally frightening, especially for children. One father told me his family liked the picture, except for his 11-year-old daughter who jumped into his lap.

* "Fantastic Mr. Fox." Director Wes Anderson's take on children's author Roald Dahl's book about an upwardly mobile fox vs. three mean local farmers. Anderson uses an old form of animation (stop action, in which highly flexible models of each character are moved and photographed frame-by-frame to make up the finished film).

But Anderson's story telling is not old fashioned. The script has a sly, sophisticated wit as Mr. Fox tries to advance himself and his family from killing chickens and living underground. George Clooney's voicing of Fox makes him one of the most interesting movie characters I've seen in years.

Opening this Friday is Disney's "The Princess and the Frog," notable for a) an African-American star, and b) Disney's return to hand-drawn, 2-D animation.

Will audiences accept a visually old-fashioned cartoon feature? Sure they will, if the story and characters are compelling. Will they accept more grown up cartoons? Yes again, judging from the early success of "Christmas Carol" and "Mr. Fox."

Whether it's movies on the big screen or direct-to-home video, animation is expanding the art of cinema, and the movie business too.

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.

-- 30 --

2009'S ANIMATED FEATURE FILMS

Below, the 27 animated features released this year. The 16 direct-to-home video movies are marked with an asterisk (").

"9"

"Astro Boy"

"Barbie and the Three Musketeers" *

"Barbie Presents: Thumbelina" *

"Bionicle: The Legend Reborn" *

"Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs"
"A Christmas Carol"

"Fantastic Mr. Fox"

"Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder" *

"Garfield's Pet Force" *

"Green Lantern: First Flight" *

"Happily N'Ever After 2" *

"The Haunted World of El Superbeast" *

"Hulk Vs" *

"Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs"

"Monsters vs. Aliens"

"My Dog Tulip" *

"Planet 51"

"Pokémon: Arceus and the Jewel of Life" *
<> "The Princess and the Frog" <>

"Scooby-Doo and the Samurai Sword" *

"Superman/Batman: Public Enemies" *

"Tinker Bell: North of Neverland" *

"Up" (US)

"The Velveteen Rabbit"

"Wonder Woman" *

Sources: Wikipedia com, IMDb.com

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved

Movies and the coming Apocalypse

2010-01-16T13:21:00.000-08:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 477, Nov. 29, 2009

===============================

THE APOCALYPSE: THEN, NOW AND FOREVER

The end of the world as we know it
began way before ‘2012’ and ‘V’

By John Greenwald

Americans are by history and nature an optimistic people. We descend from immigrants seeking better lives for themselves and their families. We built political and economic systems on the belief that the best will emerge from competitive marketplaces. Most put our ultimate faith in a God that is just and forgiving.

We're so optimistic that New York City's MetroCard is being printed with the word "optimism" on the back. (You may not want to look for the "optimism" MetroCard as only seven million have been printed this year, out of 120 million overall printed through October. Another seven million "optimism" cards will be printed next year.)

Of course, there are millions of reasons optimism might be needed right now, besides on MetroCards. The United States and the rest of the world are in the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression 70 years ago.

Even with the best efforts -- and hundreds of billions -- that the Bush and Obama administrations spent, and are spending, to get us out of this mess, there still are those lesser disasters now playing on our entertainment screens. To wit, movies and TV shows whose subject matter is worldwide cataclysms:

* "2012," director and co-writer Roland Emmerich's latest end-of-the-world, special effects laden disaster flick. Having given us "Independence Day" (1996), "Godzilla" (1998) and "The Day After Tomorrow" (2004), Emmerich now goes beyond mere attacks from alien spaceships, a rampaging giant lizard and a brand new ice age.

In "2012," an explosion of neutrinos from massive solar flares is heating up the Earth's molten core. Earthquakes and volcanoes tear open the Earth's surface. Tsunamis wash away what's left. The planet's tectonic plates and magnetic poles dramatically shift, literally turning the Earth upside down. Around the world, cities and monuments are destroyed; the South magnetic pole is in Wisconsin. (Never one to avoid a cliché, Emmerich uses the most obvious one to show the spreading crack in Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" fresco in the Sistine Chapel.)

* "The Road": If "2012" takes place during the apocalypse, this bleak film version of author Cormac McCarthy's depressing novel takes place after. An unexplained new Ice Age is oozing down North America, where a father and his son walk from bleaker to bleaker landscape in hope of reaching a warm coast. Critics have described "The Road" as unbearably grim, but with saving embers of hope and humanity.

* "FlashForward": This new ABC television series is less an apocalypse of the physical world than of every human's mental one. A few weeks ago, everyone on the planet goes unconscious for 137 seconds. Those hundreds of thousands who don't die in this calamity see what could be visions of their lives six months in the future. Maybe happy visions, maybe sad, maybe mundane. All we know so far is that some people caused the FlashForward. And even the FBI team investigating hardly knows even that.

* "V," also on ABC: the Doomsday Network, this is a remake by the same producer of the original, mid-1980's TV series. A race of super attractive, human-like extraterrestrials descend upon Earth for "peaceful" purposes. Within the show's first hour, we learn that a) underneath that perfect skin is reptilian skin, and b) the creatures have reptilian purposes, too. The Visitors want to take over the Earth and destroy humankind. These are entertainments (though perhaps not consistently entertaining), so be assured they don't require the total obliteration of the planet and the people on it. To my memory, of major Hollywood movies, that extreme ending only happened in (SPOILER ALERT!) Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" (1964).

This rash of apocalyptic movies and TV shows maybe be recent but not new. They've been a staple of films ever since the post-nuclear 1950s. And centuries before that, end times stories, myths and Biblical revelation have been part of our religions and cultures. This makes sense, as real disasters have destroyed everything from tribes to villages, from cities to civilizations. Today, we may think we're in control, but Katrina to H1N1 say otherwise, not to mention the Great Recession of 2008.

These disaster movies and TV series are part of a long line of fables, stories, prophecies and histories that help us deal with those Four Horseman, especially the one on the pale horse -- death.

-- 30 --

MORE GLIMPSES OF ‘THE END IS COMING’

The movies and TV shows mentioned in the accompanying article aren't the only examples of apocalyptic entertainment. Some are limited to an ocean liner, others to the entire planet. Here are a few more.

"War of the Worlds" (1953, 2005): Invaders from Mars are thisclose from destroying humankind. The first version is by far the best.

"The Andromeda Strain" (1971): Extraterrestrial organisms start killing off the human race. "The Poseidon Adventure" (1972): An ocean liner turns upside down. Who will, and won't, survive?

"The Towering Inferno" (1974): "The Poseidon Adventure," only right side up.

"Battlestar Galactica": These 1978 and 2004 TV series have what's left of human civilization scouring the universe looking for the original Earth.

"Armageddon" (1998): A giant asteroid threatens to barrel into Earth and destroy it.

"I Am Legend" (2007): Will Smith plays the lone human left on Earth, trying to survive in a deserted New York. –- John Greenwald

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved

What Fairness Doctrine?

2010-01-06T22:38:00.000-08:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 476, Nov. 22, 2009

===============================

THE FAIRNESS DOCTRINE:
ALIVE? DEAD? WHO CARES?

This non-issue is more about showbiz and
money than politics and free speech

By John Greenwald

Here are two words guaranteed to get political bloggers and their
broadcasting compatriots bloviating in either horror or glee:

THE FAIRNESS DOCTRINE.

This since-discarded government rule illustrates how much radio and TV
have changed over the last two decades.

First, what was the fairness doctrine?

It was an FCC rule requiring all radio and TV stations to offer "a
reasonable amount of broadcast time to the discussion of controversial
issues," and that they do so "fairly, in order to afford reasonable
opportunity for opposing viewpoints."

The FCC put the rule in place in 1949, and it lasted until 1987, when by
a unanimous vote it abolished it.

Why was there such a rule?

Back in 1949, most Americans were lucky to hear a dozen radio stations,
except at night when radio signals traveled farther. Even by the
mid-1950s, when television began dominating broadcasting, the chances
were you could watch fewer than two or three channels, unless you lived
in or near a big city.

Sometimes there were technical reasons for this paucity of TV outlets:
TV signals could travel only far. Even today, New Hampshire's largest
city, Manchester, has only two channels -- an ABC affiliate and a PBS
one. Sometimes there were political reasons. For years, Austin, Tex.,
had only one TV station, which was controlled by the Lyndon Johnson
family. Now there are seven.

Congress was afraid that so few broadcasting outlets would mean even
fewer "discussion[s] of controversial issues ... [and] opposing
viewpoints." Congress also accepted the idea that the airwaves belonged
to public, not to the station owners. They merely hold licenses to
broadcast over those airwaves for eight years, when they have to be renewed.

But the Congressionally imposed fairness doctrine began to unravel with
the onset of changing technology and Ronald Reagan.

Technology added FM to the radio dial and UHF (channels 14 through 83)
to TV. Next came national cable TV services, beginning with HBO in 1972.
By the early 1980s, many conservatives and libertarians felt
broadcasting no longer needed limits on political and issue-oriented
programming, given all the new stations popping up. There were more
radio and TV outlets in some communities than publications on local
newsstands. They said the fairness doctrine was infringing on the First
Amendment, not enhancing free speech.

Leading the charge against the doctrine within the FCC was chairman Mark
S. Fowler. He was a communications attorney who had served on Reagan's
presidential campaign staff in 1976 and 1980. This February, Fowler told
conservative radio host Mark Levin that his opposition to the doctrine
was based purely on principle. "I believe, as President Reagan, did that
the electronic press ... should be and must be as free from government
control as the press that uses paper and ink."

I doubt if Fowler anticipated the consequences of that decision --
mainly the highly popular, and profitable, conservative Fox News Channel
and all those equally conservative national and local talk radio shows.
Radio's liberal Air America and cable's MSNBC pale by comparison.

Returning to the fairness doctrine was unthinkable until Democrats
gained control of Congress and the White House last year. A handful of
Democratic legislators off-handedly spouted a few pro-doctrine comments,
mainly teasing for a Republican reaction.

President Obama said he favored something called Internet neutrality,
which led some conservatives to believe he wanted to return to the
fairness doctrine. Net neutrality is a complicated issue, and I'm not
sure it leads to the fairness rule.

Whatever, Republicans fired back in outrage. Any return to the fairness
doctrine was unfair to them, to the Constitution, and to the Republic
for which it stands. They mounted a spurt of columns and broadcasts
defending the status quo, afraid the FCC was returning to 1949 the next
day.

But, as Washington Post media columnist recently wrote in his blog, "The
Fairness Doctrine is not coming back. The Obama administration does not
support bringing it back. ... There is no concerted effort in Congress
to do that."

So, let's be clear: a) not only won't the fairness doctrine return in
your lifetime or mine, but b) politics and free speech have little to do
with it.

This is all about money.

Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann are entertainers. Limbaugh even called himself that. Radio and TV entertainers succeed only if their shows have large enough audiences to generate
advertising dollars -- profitable advertising dollars.

We're not dealing with calm discussions about politics or issues. For
that go to PBS or NPR or your more balanced newspaper op-ed pages. We're
dealing with showbiz, with the emphasis on the biz.

Fairness, as in the Fairness Doctrine, is no fun. Glenn Beck is. His
show is carefully, cleverly built around a TV character, Glenn Beck. His
passionate monologues talk right to you. Keith Olbermann is his own
character, and is also fun, only he prefers heated lecturing. Depending
on your politics, one or the other character will make your blood boil,
in either agreement or disagreement.

That's what counts -- money, not "fairness." As they say, that's
entertainment!

Finally and personally, I'm no fan of government control of broadcasting
content, whether it's politics or offensiveness. The less government
here, the better.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved

Where will you watch movies?

2010-01-06T15:03:00.000-08:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 475, Nov. 15, 2009

===============================

WHERE WILL YOU WATCH MOVIES:
ON THE BIG SCREEN OR A TINY ONE?

In a post-DVD world, hybrid television
(Blue-ray and streaming video) is king

This is the last of a two-part series.

By John Greenwald

If you're over 40, chances are you watch movies on only two kinds of screens: the big screen at the movie theater and the small TV screen at home.

But if you're under 40, there's a good chance you're also watching movies on a computer screen. And if you're under 25, you may be seeing them on much smaller screens, like the iPhone, Blackberry or some other smart phone or handheld device.

This is a confusing time to be in the film business, whether you're making them, or distributing them, or showing them. The variety of venues one can see a movie -- whether it's at a big-screen theater or on a cell phone -- grows weekly. Think of it as triangle occupied by the movie studios, the device manufacturers, and the film distributors.

What ties this triangle together is a single word: confusion.

The studios (say, Disney), the distribution systems (such as Netflix or Comcast), and the device makers (Apple, Blackberry) are trying to sort out the best, and most profitable, way to get films to you. Some are working on going direct from their computers to yours, as Netflix is doing. Others, like Time Warner and Comcast are working on ways to send you even more movies through their cable wires.

The key concept in this brave new movie and home video world is digital distribution. As I wrote last week, the age of the DVD is over -- eventually to be replaced by digital signals going from some great computer server in the sky to your home. Actually, "great computer server in the sky" is an apt metaphor. Digital movies and TV shows come to you through football fields of computer servers (servers are one or more PCs hitched together). These stacks and stacks of PCs is called "cloud computing," where everything is stored and processed in the "cloud."

There are too many different entities sending and receiving movies to wrap one's head around.

Take Netflix, for example. It's best known for those ubiquitous red envelopes with DVDs and high def Blue-ray discs being mailed to its 10 million subscribers. But Reed Hastings, Netflix's founder and CEO, has been looking way beyond its Web-based, mail order system of film rentals. Netflix has moved far ahead of the rest of the home video industry by offering subscribers its thousands of digitized titles in as many formats as possible. The rest of the industry is trying to catch up.

Netflix is working with many other consumer electronics companies to provide customers a wide array of devices that can instantly stream movies and TV episodes from Netflix to members' TVs. Currently, they include Blu-ray disc players and new Internet TVs from LG Electronics; Blu-ray disc players from Samsung; the Roku digital video player; Microsoft's Xbox 360 game console; TiVo digital video recorders; and, soon, Internet TVs from Sony and VIZIO.

Netflix is probably working on a half-dozen other formats, including making films transferable -- so you can download a movie to a PC on Tuesday and play it on a Zune on Wednesday. Disney and a consortium of other studios are working on similar transferable technology. I'm surprised Netflix isn't collaborating with Apple or other cell phone companies to stream movies directly to their cell phones; maybe it is.

You think watching a movie on a teeny, tiny cell phone screen is ridiculous? Don't ask Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation (the "Shrek" movies). He was in India a few weeks ago and saw people watching movies on their cell phones. He doesn't see the nuttiness of this but rather a business opportunity.

"They have 450 million people who have cell phones, and [the business is] growing at the rate of 8 million a month," he told BusinessWeek. "People want to see great stories, and while you have to adapt to these changes, I think they are opportunities, not liabilities."

The challenge is to find the right money-making system to deliver movies from companies like Netflix or Disney or 20th Century Fox to your home screen, whether it's a 52-inch plasma or a 3.5-inch iPhone. Retailers and electronics manufacturers hope hybrid Blue-ray/video streaming players will attract buyers this holiday season. Wall Street analysts expect brand-name versions of these hybrid players to sell for about $150 each the day after Thanksgiving, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Everyone from Hollywood executives to film producers to the electronics industry are praying that Blue-ray discs and hybrid video players will rescue their businesses until the Great Recession of 2008 passes.

But will Blue-ray and video streaming fight for the same market? Blue-ray has noticeably better picture quality, and video streaming has greater convenience (Americans love their instant-on-instant-off technology). Lexine Wong, senior executive vice-president of worldwide marketing for Sony Pictures Home Entertainment told The Wall Street Journal that they're complementary.

A few of us still can remember when the only place to see a movie was in a movie theater. Today's post-DVD world will feature a myriad of gizmos big and small showing a myriad of movies big and small. Regardless of size, they'll still be stories people want to see.

-- 30 --

Hollywood's new horror show: digital distribution

2009-12-03T19:53:00.000-08:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 474, Nov. 8, 2009

===============================

WE LOVE FILMS SO MUCH,
WE'LL WATCH THEM ANYWHERE

From TV to iPhones,From TV to iPhones, Hollywood
has a new horror show: digital distribution

By John Greenwald

This is the first of two columns.

We love movies. We love them in theaters with giant IMAX screens and in 3-D, and we now love them on little handheld devices like cell phones, with 3 1/2-inch screens -- smaller than a post card. If movies were on postage stamps, there are people who would watch them on there, we're that crazy for movies.

Today's technology lets us see films every which way -- from screens on the sides of building walls to screens we can put in our pockets. And while this may be exciting for movie fans, it's discombobulating the movie industry. They want to make money off these new delivery systems, and well they should. It's only fair that we pay for movies so filmmakers are paid for their work.

The columns I write on the business of Hollywood may be boring to some. But money determines content. Rarely does a picture that costs only $11,000 to make become a $65-million hit: That's what happened to this season's "Paranormal Activity," to Hollywood's shock and awe. Note: To get from $11,000 to $64 million, Paramount Pictures had to spend $350,000 to buy the distribution rights and another $10 million to market it.

"Paranormal's" writer-director Oren Peli now is shooting his second film, "Area 51," for $5 million, That's a miniscule budget in Hollywood but far, far more than Peli's used to. "Area 51" is sci-fi pix about teens who stumble upon a desert area known for hosting an alien encounter, according to IMDb.com.

For contrast, writer-director James Cameron's new, 3-D, sci-fi "Avatar," which is especially heavy with computer graphics, will cost upwards of $240 million just to make, according to press reports. It will have to take in twice that to break even.

So money issues matter.

Unlike the music industry, which long resisted digital distribution of its product, much to its financial grief, Hollywood is trying to get with the program, if it can only figure out which program it is.

Hollywood sells its movies to scores of distribution networks. There are movie theater chains. Broadcast television was a big user of movies from its earliest days. (Even radio loved films, regularly broadcasting radio dramatizations of new hits. These shows often used the same stars re-enacting their film roles in front of a microphone but with no cameras.)

After broadcast TV came cable TV. Advertising-supported cable stations, say, Syfy (formerly Sci Fi, the science fiction network), played movies much like their broadcast cousins, except with fewer commercials and fewer cuts of the violent, sexy and dirty language parts. Pay cable was next, with movies full of their violent, sexy and dirty language parts.

Then came the cable providers themselves, like Comcast, with the wires that come into your homes and the cable boxes that sit atop your TV sets. They have "on demand" services, where you can pick from hundreds of titles to see at your choosing. Some are free, others you pay for.

While all this movies-on-TV stuff was going on, especially on cable, enter the DVD. Quickly supplanting the videocassette market, these silvery discs became the medium of choice for tens of millions of film lovers. First people rented them at video stores like Blockbusters, but soon they discovered DVDs-by-mail, courtesy of Web-based companies like Netflix.

For a decade, the DVD was king, with Hollywood was making hundreds of millions through their sales and rentals. But now, DVDs are slipping.

In the third quarter of this year, studios' home entertainment divisions took in about $4 billion, down 3.2 percent from a year ago, the New York Times reported. DVD sales themselves were down 14 percent for the same quarter, Forbes reported.

Buried in that $4 billion was $420 million for something called digital distribution -- movies delivered over Internet and wireless connections to computers and handheld devices, such as iPods and other kinds of cell phones.

Digital distribution may be relatively small, but it grew an impressive 18 percent over the previous period. Hollywood execs believe DVDs will always be an important part of their business, but it also must soon contend with digital. As Times reporter Brooks Barnes concluded in a major story on this topic last week, "DVDs will continue to play a role, but it may be a supporting one to digital."

The problem is there are so many different digital devices for viewers to watch movies, that Hollywood's still trying to figure out the technology part and the money part -- how to get movies to all these gizmos and how to get paid for them.

Next week: How will Hollywood manage the new technologies and new business models to meet consumers' demands, and still make money?

REDBOX -- LOW-TECH DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION

Maybe you've seen the tall red vending machines from which you can rent, on the spot, a DVD for a dollar a night. Some 21,000 Redbox kiosks are in convenience stores, supermarkets and the like across the country. The $1 charge is far less than video store prices, or video on-demand. Redbox's old-fashioned kiosks pack upwards of 700 titles, which are usually new and family oriented.

Half of Hollywood's studios won't sell their films to Redbox because they fear those kiosks are undercutting their sales to other video outlets and cable. Redbox employees will even buy hot new titles from nearby retailers like Target at full price to keep their machines current and full.

Another distribution stream gives Hollywood conniptions.

-- John Greenwald

E-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

Is 'FlashForward' the new 'Lost'?

2009-12-03T19:23:00.000-08:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 473, Oct. 25, 2009

===============================

WHEN EXTREMELY PRESSED,
HOW WILL WE BEHAVE?

From Hitchcock to the new 'FlashForward,'
movies and TV series ask this question

By John Greenwald

"Is 'FlashForward' the new 'Lost'?"

That's the question bubbling through the blogosphere when "FlashForward" premiered in September. Of course, ABC, which broadcasts both shows, has described "FF" as a sort of creative successor to "Lost," which ends its run next May. Each program has large ensemble casts and characters with many intertwining storylines. Done right, drama series like these can hook intensely devoted fans.

Both shows have a patina of being reality based, yet soon enough it's clear they also have major sci-fi elements. But that's not what attracted me to them. Both expound on the concept of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstance.

This may be a well-trod dramatic path, but it still is one of the best to reveal the inner workings of characters. If those extraordinary circumstances are not too far beyond possibility, audiences can identify with the characters and emotionally participate in the drama.

For those who watch only PBS and Turner Classic Movies, here are brief summaries of "Lost" and "FF."

* "Lost" begins simply enough -- a Sydney to Los Angeles jetliner breaks in two and crashes on a richly forested, uninhabited Pacific island. The survivors work out ways to survive, and in the process we learn about them, especially in backstory flashbacks. For example, one character is being brought back to the U.S. to stand trial for murder. Another's a paraplegic who can walk after the crash.

With more than 25 major characters, "Lost" would not be an easy show to follow, except the producers and writers keep them all manageable. Quickly, however, weirder elements are added, including a killer cloud, polar bears and a hatch that leads to a underground world that once housed its own community. Complications ensue, including an aboveground compound on a nearby island somehow attached to the main island's underground one.

I was hooked for the first three seasons, but as the series dealt less and less with survival on a "lost" island, and more with sci-fi stuff, including time flash forwards, I lost interest. The last few seasons sit unwatched on my DVR, taking up valuable disc space. I'll need a three-day "Lost" weekend marathon to catch up. Still, even with its stranger elements, the show made for compelling viewing.

* "FlashForward" is only a few episodes old, not a few seasons, but it shows much promise. Unlike "Lost," which slipped in its surreal elements episode by episode, "FF" begins with a giant "what if." Everyone on the planet simultaneously loses consciousness for 137 seconds. They fall down, fall off, lose control. Some even die. Parts of L.A. are burning.

During their three-minute-plus comas, people imagine their futures in six months, on April 29 or April 30, 2010, depending on time zones. Some share the same "future" events. Some don't see a "future," leading them to fear they'll be dead in six months.

So far, "FF" focuses on a small group of people connected to an FBI team trying to figure out who or what caused the blackouts, and can another one be stopped. By the fourth episode, we learn that at least two people caused the blackouts and were awake during them.

What holds my interest is how people deal the blackouts and their visions of their "futures."

To the head of the FBI team, this is a problem to be solved. To his wife, a surgeon, the visions predict nothing, a stance that almost leads to the death of a patient. I'm fascinated by how these characters struggle to understand their blackouts and their new "futures."

How ordinary people deal with extraordinary circumstance is a common theme of both fiction and non-fiction. Currently, our combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan fit that non-fiction category, as does Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger, who safely landed his jet on the Hudson River. Indeed, real life heroes make up an entire genre of publishing; Sullenberger has recently written a memoir, "My Search for What Really Matters."

In fiction, these stories are just as gripping, sometimes more so.

From 1963 to 1967, ABC aired "The Fugitive." Much of America was transfixed by this series about a doctor who comes home to find his wife brutally murdered by a man with one arm. Convicted of the crime, he escapes and begins his long search to find that one-armed man. As he crisscrosses the country, he meets different people somehow in need of his help. Each episode intermingled his story with theirs. "The Fugitive" was turned into a successful movie in 1993.

Alfred Hitchcock used the device of an innocent man running from the police while simultaneously pursuing the real killer in films like "The 39 Steps" (1935), "Saboteur" (1942) and "North by Northwest" (1959). My favorite Hitchcock film of this genre is his neorealistic drama "The Wrong Man" (1956), where Henry Fonda plays a real life victim of police mistaken identity. How Fonda and his wife survive this crises -- or don't -- is more instructive about human nature and our imperfect criminal justice system than most of his other pictures.

But all these movies and TV shows give us a measure to imagine our own possible conduct in such extraordinary circumstances.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

TV shows ask, how will we behave under pressure

2009-11-06T19:51:00.000-08:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 472, Oct. 25, 2009

===============================

WHEN EXTREMELY PRESSED,
HOW WILL WE BEHAVE?

From Hitchcock to the new 'FlashForward,'
movies and TV series ask this question

By John Greenwald

"Is 'FlashForward' the new 'Lost'?"

That's the question bubbling through the blogosphere when "FlashForward" premiered in September. Of course, ABC, which broadcasts both shows, has described "FF" as a sort of creative successor to "Lost," which ends its run next May. Each program has large ensemble casts and characters with many intertwining storylines. Done right, drama series like these can hook intensely devoted fans.

Both shows have a patina of being reality based, yet soon enough it's clear they also have major sci-fi elements. But that's not what attracted me to them. Both expound on the concept of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstance.

This may be a well-trod dramatic path, but it still is one of the best to reveal the inner workings of characters. If those extraordinary circumstances are not too far beyond possibility, audiences can identify with the characters and emotionally participate in the drama.

For those who watch only PBS and Turner Classic Movies, here are brief summaries of "Lost" and "FF."

* "Lost" begins simply enough -- a Sydney to Los Angeles jetliner breaks in two and crashes on a richly forested, uninhabited Pacific island. The survivors work out ways to survive, and in the process we learn about them, especially in backstory flashbacks. For example, one character is being brought back to the U.S. to stand trial for murder. Another's a paraplegic who can walk after the crash.

With more than 25 major characters, "Lost" would not be an easy show to follow, except the producers and writers keep them all manageable. Quickly, however, weirder elements are added, including a killer cloud, polar bears and a hatch that leads to a underground world that once housed its own community. Complications ensue, including an aboveground compound on a nearby island somehow attached to the main island's underground one.

I was hooked for the first three seasons, but as the series dealt less and less with survival on a "lost" island, and more with sci-fi stuff, including time flash forwards, I lost interest. The last few seasons sit unwatched on my DVR, taking up valuable disc space. I'll need a three-day "Lost" weekend marathon to catch up. Still, even with its stranger elements, the show made for compelling viewing.

* "FlashForward" is only a few episodes old, not a few seasons, but it shows much promise. Unlike "Lost," which slipped in its surreal elements episode by episode, "FF" begins with a giant "what if." Everyone on the planet simultaneously loses consciousness for 137 seconds. They fall down, fall off, lose control. Some even die. Parts of L.A. are burning.

During their three-minute-plus comas, people imagine their futures in six months, on April 29 or April 30, 2010, depending on time zones. Some share the same "future" events. Some don't see a "future," leading them to fear they'll be dead in six months.

So far, "FF" focuses on a small group of people connected to an FBI team trying to figure out who or what caused the blackouts, and can another one be stopped. By the fourth episode, we learn that at least two people caused the blackouts and were awake during them.

What holds my interest is how people deal the blackouts and their visions of their "futures."

To the head of the FBI team, this is a problem to be solved. To his wife, a surgeon, the visions predict nothing, a stance that almost leads to the death of a patient. I'm fascinated by how these characters struggle to understand their blackouts and their new "futures."

How ordinary people deal with extraordinary circumstance is a common theme of both fiction and non-fiction. Currently, our combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan fit that non-fiction category, as does Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger, who safely landed his jet on the Hudson River. Indeed, real life heroes make up an entire genre of publishing; Sullenberger has recently written a memoir, "My Search for What Really Matters."

In fiction, these stories are just as gripping, sometimes more so.

From 1963 to 1967, ABC aired "The Fugitive." Much of America was transfixed by this series about a doctor who comes home to find his wife brutally murdered by a man with one arm. Convicted of the crime, he escapes and begins his long search to find that one-armed man. As he crisscrosses the country, he meets different people somehow in need of his help. Each episode intermingled his story with theirs. "The Fugitive" was turned into a successful movie in 1993.

Alfred Hitchcock used the device of an innocent man running from the police while simultaneously pursuing the real killer in films like "The 39 Steps" (1935), "Saboteur" (1942) and "North by Northwest" (1959). My favorite Hitchcock film of this genre is his neorealistic drama "The Wrong Man" (1956), where Henry Fonda plays a real life victim of police mistaken identity. How Fonda and his wife survive this crises -- or don't -- is more instructive about human nature and our imperfect criminal justice system than most of his other pictures.

But all these movies and TV shows give us a measure to imagine our own possible conduct in such extraordinary circumstances.

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net. Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

-- 30 --

Motion pictures as product lines

2009-10-15T18:20:00.000-07:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 471, Oct. 18, 2009

===============================

MOVIES AREN'T MOVIES ANYMORE
-- THEY'RE PRODUCT LINES

Disney slices and dices its films and
TV shows into multiple media platforms

By John Greenwald

Betchya thought all the film industry wanted you to do was take in a half dozen movies a year; buy or rent a few DVDs; and see a couple of pay-per-view pictures on cable TV?

No way.

Ever since Walt Disney released "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" in 1937, Hollywood has been thinking of its movies as pies, slicing and dicing them into pieces, selling them to you, and hoping they would grow into new pies to sell all over again. (I know this metaphor sounds like a bad horror film, but Hollywood marketing often is a bad horror film.

Walt Disney himself was the first in Hollywood to turn movies, mainly their characters, into commemorative toys, dishes, lunch boxes, dolls, and even toy tea sets. (An original 1937 complete 23-piece "Snow White" China and porcelain tea set is for sale today on e-Bay for $499.99.)

Disney licensed his characters to toy and other manufacturers to cover the unanticipated high costs of making "Snow White." For decades this licensing and marketing was limited children's goods, but 40 years later in 1977 George Lucas changed that with "Star Wars." Aimed at both kids and adults, "Star Wars" accessories are profit-center universes unto their own. Today, licensing and marketing are a major part of show business.

A film is not just a film anymore but also a sequel, a series, a franchise, a TV show, and a made-for-TV-movie. It's a Broadway musical, a video game, an animated kids TV show, a bunch of comic book titles and a rack of novelizations.

It's also a CD, two dozen MP3 songs, a half-dozen iPod videos, a few Facebook and MySpace pages and Twitter accounts. The musicals generate star performers and their own live performances, concert tours and 3-D Imax movies of their concerts. Under correct management, a mere movie can become a many layered product line, with scores of spin-offs from more movies to Bobblehead dolls.

Disney is still the master of turning a single entertainment entity into a bunch of product lines.

It was front-page news Tuesday when the New York Times reported that Disney was investing $1 million to expand each of its 340 Disney Stores worldwide, and add a new store in Times Square. Disney's goal in the next five years is to convert their stores into mini-theme parks, with a theater and computer chip-enhanced interactive displays and toys. Disney is negotiating right now for more space with mall owners. These new Disney stores might be rebranded Imagination Parks, the Times reports. They "will become more akin to cozy entertainment hubs" than just "row after row of toys and apparel geared to Disney franchises."

Of course, you'll still be able to buy from row after row of toys and apparel amid all this electronic theatricality.

At these new Disney Whatevers, you'll also be able to book reservations to Disney Resorts or Cruises while your kids watch Disney film clips they've picked out, or sing in karaoke contests, or talk live with Disney Channel stars via satellite, the Times reports.

Many of these ideas come from Disney board member Steve Jobs, head of Apple, which has its own chain of highly successful Apple stores. "Apple is king of the mall," the Times says. Its stores had sales of about $4,700 a square foot last year, the most for any retail chain. By comparison, Best Buy's sells about $1,000 a square foot. All this Disney business from a bunch of squiggly little drawings made during the last 70 years.

"Dream bigger -- that was Steve's message," Andy Mooney, chairman of Disney Consumer Products, told the Times. Dream Disney did, which is remarkable given how many retailers -- and movie companies, too -- are Dreaming of ways just to stay in business during the Great Recession of 2008. Disney expansion goes against retailing tends.

Disney is also making changes in its movie business -- to better slice and griow that product pie.

Last month, the head of its movie studio abruptly quit, replaced by the head of the Disney Channel. The main difference between the two is the TV guy, Rich Ross, had more hits than the movie guy. Ross' hits spanned more product levels than bleachers have rows.

Under Ross, the Disney Channel became a franchise-generating machine, says the Times. It created TV shows and their movie spin offs like "Hannah Montana" and "High School Musical." In the pipeline is the animated TV show "Handy Manny," for preschool-age children, and "Wizards of Waverly Place," starring yet another young teen Disney star, Selena Gomez. "Keenly attuned to the so-called tween audience, aged 6 to 14, Ross has also played a significant role in the rise of the Jonas Brothers," highly popular and profitable teen songsters.

From a single tune to a giant cruise ship, Disney creates new products and new versions of old ones to generate more cash flow and profits. It's not alone, as 20th Century Fox does the same with its "Star Wars" franchise, and Warner Bros. similarly uses its Bugs Bunny/Road Runner characters in various media.

All to cleverly separate us from our money -- whether we're children or adults.

-- 30 --

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net. Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

How good sci-fi works

2009-10-15T18:15:00.000-07:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 470, Oct. 4, 2009

===============================

FROM PEOPLE TO 'PRAWNS':
HOW GOOD SCI-FI WORKS

'9' and 'District 9' reveal science fiction
at its subtle best and its most obvious

By John Greenwald

In truth, science fiction has little to do with the future or the past, or with spaceships, or time travel or alien monsters. Science fiction, like most other fiction, has everything to do with us, the human species, in the here and now. For all their special effects and fancy gizmos, science fiction stories boil down to human drama.

Steven Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" (2005) was not about an army of tall, three-legged monsters shooting nasty fireball bombs. It was about a shallow, lazy father (Tom Cruise) giving of himself to protect his children.

J.J. Abrams's "Star Trek" (2009) examines the crew of the USS Enterprise before its members became such a well-oiled machine, when they were fresh out of the Starfleet Academy and strangers to each other, and how they became a team and a family.

Indeed, both the "War of the Worlds" and "Star Trek" at heart are family dramas, with added sci-fi action.

But that's what science fiction does, it illuminates people and their times. It lets us care about its characters, even gross-out-ugly aliens, as does any good fiction. The best sci-fi makes us think about our times and the issues and ideas that conflict and propel them.

Which brings us to two sci-fi films that opened late this summer.

* "9" takes place in a post-apocalypse future where mad killing machines have destroyed just about everything except nine newly created life forms. They're the size of forearms and have human-like personalities.

* In "District 9," a South African drama set in the present, an alien mother ship, having accidentally run out of fuel, food and water, suspends itself over Johannesburg, South Africa, causing all sorts of tribulations to the humans below.

These films don't have much in common except brilliant use of computer graphics and the number 9 in their titles. They illustrate how science fiction can reveal much about human life today, even though we don't have an alien space ship hovering over, say, New Jersey, or our "descendants" are struggling to survive amid humanity's ruins.

As "9" is the lesser of these two, let's deal with it first.

Scientists have created machines for humanity's benefit, but they've been taken over by militarists for their own benefit. Since computer artists and their technologies aren't very good at creating human beings, these humans look like comic book exaggerations. When the machines take over and destroy all (including the generals), the last scientist builds nine burlap-skinned creatures. Each looks to be 18 inches tall and is imbued with a set of human attributes.

The first critter the scientist made is 1, the leader who's old, tired and without new ideas to fight the machines. The latest, and last, is 9, fresh, full of courage, and ready to fight back. There may be nine of them, but together they don't add up to the kind of fully rounded character that we might see in a decent actioner.

More interesting are the machines, headed by the Beast, computer marvels of clicking, clacking, fire-spewing brutality. Think of giant, erector-set insects with multiple Edward Scissorhands arms and legs.

"9's" plot, characters and ideas are far less engaging than its visuals. Director Shane Acker metalicizes insects to a fearful, fascinating degree.

Computer graphics also make "District 9" possible -- first in the giant spaceship floating over Johannesburg, and soon after in the hundreds of thousands of its passengers and crew disgorged to the ground. Starving, they survive minimally in a giant, ever-growing shantytown on the edge of Johannesburg.

The film never mentions South Africa's real shantytowns, much less its 45-year history of separating human races and putting blacks in "townships" (shantytowns) of their own. Though this kind of legal segregation ended nearly 20 years ago, its effects still exist. "District 9" revolves around how one culture, race, nationality, religious sect, etc., will stick to it's own but separate, segregate and discriminate against the "other."

In "District 9," the "others" are oddly passive aliens that look like a cross between a seven-foot lobster and a slimy, black grasshopper. They talk in a gurgle that a few South Africans understand. Humans derisively call them "prawns."

The government, having contained the aliens for two decades, now wants to move them to a larger settlement, far away from Johannesburg. A bureaucrat knocks on the aliens' junkyard doors asking their permission to be moved. If that doesn't work, they're rousted by a private, Blackhawk-like army, violently if necessary.

We see this story from two angles, that of a white government official leading the aliens' resettlement and one alien and his son who fight to stay where they are. The film echoes with modern examples: from Nazi concentration camps, to American internment camps for Japanese during World War II, to Apartheid, to France's recent uprooting of its illegal, Muslim immigrants. It displays the two ways humans separate themselves from the "others" -- with vicious force and with legal chicanery. Whatever works.

The documentary story-telling style is dramatic and effective: We relate to people and prawns alike. The chase and shoot-'em-up ending is suspenseful, but 10-minutes too long. Above all, "District 9" captures our emotions while making us think.

That's good science fiction!

-- 30 --

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net. Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

The Variety Show, from Ancient Rome to Jay Leno

2009-10-03T22:05:00.000-07:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 469, Sept. 22, 2009

==============================

THE VARIETY SHOW, FROM
ANCIENT ROME TO JAY LENO

TV's version of vaudeville has been a staple,
in either prime time or late night

By John Greenwald

Variety shows have always been part of popular entertainment, at least since Roman times. What went on in its amphitheaters were variety shows on a colossal scale: animal acts, gladiators and chariot races. One colosseum in Rome was even flooded for naval battles. Now that's entertainment!

Today, variety shows still exist, though maybe not as large as Rome's. There's the circus, with its animal, acrobatic and clown acts. Las Vegas has its own circus (" ... du Soleil"), animal acts, music and dance (plus showgirls in costumes galore). On a much smaller scale, elementary and middle schools have their "pageants."

In America of the 1850s and '60s, variety shows played in western saloons, and small town "opera houses" and urban beer halls. Many shows were aimed at men and got pretty racy. By the late 1800s, they all merged into family entertainment -- vaudeville: groups of acts put together by booking agents to travel the country. The shows went to hundreds of theaters -- from small towns to big cities. Many acts built a national following, with performers like juggler and comedian W.C. Fields and the cowboy comic Will Rogers becoming stars in the new media of film and radio.

But vaudeville flourished only a few decades before being overcome by radio and movies. Radio took much of the talent, the singers and comics; and movies took the venues, as vaudeville houses became movie houses. As early as 1896, vaudeville bookers were using short films as an extra added attraction, and to clear theaters between shows. By the late 1920s, movies dominated the programs and vaudeville acts were the fillers. After World War II, vaudeville was dead.

Still, there were plenty of talented performers out there. Those who could sing, dance and be funny found work, if not fame, in radio, movies and even in television. A New York Daily News Broadway columnist, Ed Sullivan, hosted a CBS television variety show from 1948 through 1971. If you were anyone of talent or fame in the performing arts, you appeared on his "shew," from opera singers to, most famously of all, Elvis Presley and the Beatles.

Like vaudeville, there was something for everyone on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Scenes from Broadway musicals. Magicians and jugglers (remember the old English gentleman with the spinning plates?). Dancing bears, dogs and chimps. Borscht Belt comics like Alan King, Sam Levenson and Joan Rivers. Sullivan had a newsman's instinct for what was new and what the public wanted or would like, regardless of his own personal tastes. He was the ultimate vaudeville booking agent.

And, his choices affected not only performers' careers, but the public's taste.

By the mid-'50s, television was into its own mid-50s: In 1955, half of all U.S. households had a TV set (today, it's 99 percent). Rock 'n' roll, had been confined to the teen lifestyle of radio, touring shows and state fairs. Thanks to television variety show, rock was going into America's living rooms for all to see and hear.

Of course, Sullivan's wasn't the only TV variety show. The format had become a mainstay of television for half of its history -- from the late 1940s through the 1970s. Variety shows were hosted by singers (Dean Martin, Perry Como), comedians (Carol Burnett, Jackie Gleason) and "personalities" (Steve Allen, Jack Parr).

But during the 1970s, the nation's tastes changed. Variety shows went out of favor. TV was exposing the public to something less pleasant than mild-mannered vaudeville: the news. From the civil rights movement to the Vietnam War, television was filled with strong doses of life's struggles and violence, its heartbreaks and terrors. By contrast, an hour of singing, dancing and light-hearted comedy seemed irrelevant.

Drama shows took over much of each broadcast network's schedule. Series like NBC's "L.A. Law" (1986 to 1994) went beyond simple crime drama to reflect the day's news. With episodes about such subjects as domestic violence, racism, abortion and gay rights, it personalized the headlines.

Efforts in tbe '80s and '90s to revive the variety show on prime time failed, most recently with "The Wayne Brady Show" in 2002.

But TV always had another place for the variety show: late night television. In 1950, the local New York NBC station began broadcasting "Broadway Open House," which became the full NBC network's "The Tonight Show" in 1954. The show's long-time host, Jay Leno, left earlier this year in favor of a younger, more "hip" Conan O'Brien.

But mainly for economic reasons, Leno reappeared two weeks ago hosting a daily prime time variety program, "The Jay Leno Show." (A week of Leno is cheaper to produce than a week of dramas, five times cheaper.)

Leno may have been a late-night leader, but his new series is so much like the old one, it's not ready for prime time. Leno's middle-of-the-road humor and style may be audience-friendly but it lacks the energy and wit prime time requires. There's too much low-budget shtick compared to the talented acts that marked TV's best vaudeville shows in the past.

Luckily, Leno has a few years to upgrade his program, assuming NBC wants to spend the money and audiences want to see a variety show during prime time.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved. Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net.

Elia Kazan: A Great Filmmaker Re-Emerges

2009-10-03T22:00:00.000-07:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 468, Sept. 6, 2009

===============================

ELIA KAZAN: RE-EMERGING
AS A GREAT FILMMAKER

Once a powerhouse on Broadway and Hollywood,
his reputation is being restored

By John Greenwald

Today, Elia Kazan is remembered for two, maybe three, movies: "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951), "On the Waterfront" (1954) and "East of Eden" (1955). He also introduced two of America's greatest actors in those films, Marlon Brando and James Dean. (They were in other films, stage productions, and even TV, but not with this acclamation.)

For a man who began in the New York theater, where he acted a bit and directed a lot, Kazan (1909-2003) easily made the transition to film, taking many of his New York actors with him to Hollywood.

Kazan was a great man of the performing arts, a powerhouse of creativity who's half-forgotten today. Let's thank Wesleyan University for showing some of his well known and lesser-known pictures. He deserves this. Wesleyan is presenting most, but not all, of my favorite Kazan films.

Besides directing at least a dozen unforgettable movies and even more extraordinary Broadway plays, Kazan co-founded the Actors Studio in New York, which trained some of America's finest actors.

Kazan collaborated with a Who's Who of America's best known writers of the 1950s and 1960s: Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Archibald MacLeish, Thornton Wilder, John Steinbeck and Budd Schulberg. The plays and movies he directed were described as searing, powerful, revealing, socially conscious and devastating. Especially in the timid '50 and '60s, Kazan was not afraid to go after taboo subjects.

In "Gentleman's Agreement" (1947), Gregory Peck plays a magazine writer who posses as a Jew to try to get into restricted hotels. A brave picture for the time, it received Oscars for best picture, best director (Kazan) and best supporting actress (Celeste Holm). It only was Kazan's fifth Hollywood film. (Though not playing at the Wesleyan Kazan festival, it's well worth seeing).

Equally controversial was "Pinky" (1949), where Jeanne Crain plays a light-skinned black woman. She had been passing for white in the north, but when she returns to her home in the south, she has to confront racism. It was nominated for three acting Oscars: Crain (leading actress) and Ethel Barrymore and Ethel Water (supporting actresses). (It's not in the festival but worth seeing if only for the performances.)

"Panic in the Streets" (1950) is Kazan's film noir. Shot in New Orleans' waterfront and back streets, it follows a U.S. Public Health officer (Richard Widmark) searching for two hoods with pneumonic plague before they create a catastrophic epidemic. Think of "House" as an edge-of-the-seat thriller. Nominated for a screen-writing Oscar, it plays at Wesleyan Sept. 24.

"A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951) first appeared on Broadway in 1950, also directed by Kazan. Brando's visceral, sexual performance stunned New York. The film received three acting Oscars, including one for Vivien Leigh. Brando shared Oscar nominations with Kazan and six others. Kazan unforgettably brought Tennessee Williams' play to the screen and made Brando a star. For all his New York theater roots, Kazan was now an A-list Hollywood director. (Plays Oct. 1)

"Viva Zapata!", about the Mexican revolution, today is considered a second-tier Kazan film, but it's energized by a cast of superb supporting character actors. One, Anthony Quinn, received an Oscar. (Oct. 8)

In 1954 came Kazan's masterpiece, "On the Waterfront." Brando played the young longshoreman and boxer caught up in the double corruption of the fight game and the union-run docks. Schulberg wrote the intense script; Leonard Bernstein composed the jazzy, discordant score. Shot on location, it captured the docks' grubby streets, toughened faces and broken spirits, but without excessive melodrama. Brando delivered on "Streetcar's" promise, and more. "Waterfront" received eight Oscars, including best picture, best director (Kazan) and best actor (Brando), plus four nominations. (Plays Oct. 15)

Equally intense is "East of Eden" (1955), John Steinbeck's updated Cain and Abel story. It was James Dean's first staring movie, after scores of TV appearances in the early '50s. His Actors Studio's Method training paid off in an Oscar. (Nov. 5)

"A Face in the Crowd" (1957) is my favorite Kazan picture. Also written by Schulberg, it has Kazan's familiar qualities of intense acting along with a prescient point of view about the power of television that's frighten and relevant a half-century after it was made.

Andy Griffith plays "Lonesome" Rhodes, hillbilly bumpkin with little more to his name than a guitar, lots of small town patter and tall tales, and a flask in his back pocket. Patricia Neal's the newly minted college grad who puts him on her family's local radio station, and falls for him too.

Griffith's ingratiating line of down-home yarns wins over the women. Soon sponsors flock to him, his radio show goes national, then becomes a national TV show. There, he dispenses small-town wisdom and right-wing politics. Madison Avenue execs and politicians sit at his feet to learn how countrified demagoguery is done.

Griffith soon thinks: Why work for senators, when he can become one?

This chilling notion is echoed in today's radio and cable TV talkmeisters, say when MSNBC's Keith Olbermann calls Fox's Glenn Beck "Lonesome" Rhodes Beck.

By the end of his career, Kazan had received nine Tonys and five Oscars for best director, plus an honorary Oscar for his life's work -- an unsurpassed record. Thank goodness, we're not burying this man's work any longer.

-- 30 --

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net. Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

True realism is impossible

2009-09-01T22:51:00.000-07:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 467, Aug. 30, 2009

===============================

EVEN WHEN WE WANT REALISM, WE CAN'T GET IT

Everyone loves a good story. So what
that Tarantino's latest is preposterous

By John Greenwald

We've all probably given a movie a thumbs down because "it wasn't realist." I've done it, and I've been wrong. No film can be realistic. As I've written here before: If you want realism, watch a security camera tape.

What we mean by realistic is not really real, but as the American Heritage Dictionary says, "relating to the [begin ital] representation [end ital] of objects, actions, or social conditions as they actually are [my italics]." No film can be real; it just has to seem real. In essence, it has to fool us that it is real.

Fifty years ago, I saw a play, "The Connection," in Greenwich Village. In it, a bunch of heroin addicts hung around in an apartment on the stage waiting for their drug dealer, their "connection." During the intermission, the cast moved to the lobby, staying in character. One of the points of the play was that we in the audience weren't supposed to know if what we saw on stage (and in the lobby) were actors playing drug addicts or drug addicts playing actors playing drug addicts.

It worked.

I don't think we knew for sure. Of course, I doubt if any one even knew a real drug addict, this being 1959. At least "The Connection" could pull it off. It was set in real time: two hours on the stage were two hours in the lives of these people. It's easy for theater to do real time and appear realistic.

For movies, this real time business comes of as a stunt.

The entire art of the fiction film is designed to fool you into believing what you see and hear on screen, even when you're rolling your eyes in disbelief at the stupidity of filmmakers trying to pass a piece of nonsense. Still, we so much want to believe that we accept amazing foolishness as, in some way, tolerably believable. And I'm not just talking about "Harry Potter" or "Pirates of the Caribbean."

A 1994 academic study, which was the best I could find on the Web, reported these as the most popular film genres: romance, action-adventure, drama, science fiction and fantasy (I don't what happened comedy in this study). But with drama as number three, surrounded by genres heavy with make-believe, it's clear moviegoers clearly don't want reality.

But what they do want are movies that resemble the world they know, only exaggerated to one degree or another. Maybe it's not worlds they know, only worlds they might imagine (sci-fi or fantasy films), or maybe it's worlds they fear (horror films).

From childhood, we love the stories our parents read and told us. Those stories caused all those emotions to well up in us. We believed them no matter how little these tales conformed to our childhood reality because we trusted our parents.

And they were fun to read an hear.

As we grow up, we still accept these stories, even if only a few conform to our experience. We'll accept most any story as long as we can emotionally relate. We just need enough elements to hold our attention. Actors hold our attention because we share the same DNA. Put in emotionally familiar stories and we'll accept everything from robots, to wizards, to even meerkats.

No matter how silly, we still want a patina of realism, some touch of what looks like reality, a bit of "honesty."

Take writer-director Quentin Tarantino, whose World War II drama-actioner-comedy "Inglourious Basterds" is now playing. The farthest thing from his mind is realism, regardless of how much real-looking blood his characters spill, or how many scalps they remove from the enemy.

From his first feature, "Reservoir Dogs" (1992), Tarantino loved to make highly stylized pictures. In "Dogs," his main characters are thieves on a big heist. Dressed all in black suits, black ties and white shirts, they don't know each other's name except by the colors their leader has given them -- as in Mr. Orange or Mr. Black.

Is this a robbery film or kabuki theater?

"Basterds" is even more preposterous. A French teen escapes from a Nazi SS officer who loves to kill Jews. A few years later in Paris, she owns a little cinema where the Nazi high command is going to see a private review of Joseph Goebbels' latest propaganda epic. The woman, now a heart-stopping, Garbo-esque beauty, has plans for the show, including blowing up her theater and everyone inside it, all in a blaze of chilling German expressionist glory.

Meanwhile Brad Pitt plays an American lieutenant leading a squad of Jewish GIs whose mission is to torture, deface, scalp and kill as many Nazis as they can. (There's maybe a half-second close-up of scalping, but even if you quickly look away, the image lingers).

These two separate story lines converge in a tense, violent, sometimes funny and explosive extended sequence -- one that rewrites history. A revenge fantasy doesn't begin to describe the picture.

There's nothing about "Basterds" that strikes me as approaching realism. Yet I fell into its wildly overstated world like it was the real thing thanks to Tarantino's great skill in mixing fantasy and his kind of reality. Few filmmakers do as well.

-- 30 --

Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.net. Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

Food flix

2009-08-18T17:53:00.000-07:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 465, Aug. 16, 2009

===============================

A SMÖRGÅSBORD OF FOOD FLIX
TO SATISFY YOUR HUNGER

From Julia Child to Charlie Chaplin,
Hollywood dabbles in the culinary arts

By John Greenwald

"Food, glorious food!" -- From "Oliver!" (1968)

Early in my career of writing about movies, my editor gave me a list of adjectives, metaphors and other descriptive words appearing in my reviews. They all were about food. His message: Stop using all those food terms to describe movies. By that standard, this column is going to be difficult to write.

Last weekend's release of "Julie & Julia" gives film buffs and foodies a rare Hollywood experience, a film about food -- cooking it, eating it and obsessing about it. "J&J" is unusual because Hollywood releases few food-focused pictures, preferring instead a scene here or there: say in "The Godfather" (1972), when Clemenza tells Rocco, who has just killed another mobster, "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli."

The film business is more in love with computer-generated explosions and teenage romance and sex than food. That's why movie reviewers, bloggers, and foodies come up with similar lists of their favorite food films. There aren't that many choices. Still, it's rewarding to think about those few dozen food movies worth savoring. It's like recalling the truly great meals you've had. Here's my taster's choice of the best food films, in no particular order.

"Julie & Julia" (2009): The delightful summer entertainment stars a groaning board of French cuisine (heavy on the butter) and Meryl Streep's uncanny, warmly hilarious performance as Julia. Child's book, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," and her PBS show, "The French Chef," changed how America cooked and ate. The Child story alternates with office-worker Julie Powell's efforts to cook "Mastering's" 524 recipes in 365 days, and blog about it. Amy Adam's whiny Julie can't match Streep's exuberant, uproariously eccentric Child. Stanley Tucci plays Child's calm, supportive husband.

"Big Night" (1996): Stanley Tucci co-directs and stars in this intimate look at two immigrant brothers -- one a practical restaurateur, the other a food artiste -- trying to stay afloat despite themselves. Funny and touching, the film succeeds even as their restaurant struggles.

"Ratatouille"(2007): Only Pixar animation could pull off a film about a rat becoming a master chef in Paris. The movie exults in the hard work and glory in running a fine restaurant. And the final scene reveals the powerful sensory experience of a simple, but superbly prepared, vegetable stew. "Ratatouille" captures the essence of creativity.

"Eat Drink Man Woman"(1994): Director Ang Lee's gentle, poignant family comedy about a famed chef in Taipei burdened with three beautiful but rebellious daughters and his depleting taste buds. Every Sunday he prepares an exceptional meal for them, which they don't appreciate. The only way he can show his love is with food. Lee integrates its five major elements -- the father, his daughters and the food with remarkable skill.

"Tortilla Soup" (2001): Hector Elizondo plays a widowed chef who's also losing his sense of taste and control over his three willful daughters. Further stirring this pot is Raquel Welch, the sexy widow. This Mexican remake of "Eat Drink Man Woman" succeeds in its own right, with sumptuous cuisine, much family comedy and drama, and lots of broken dishes.

"Mostly Martha" (2001): The food we see in this German romantic comedy pleasures the senses more than plot. Martha's a regimented chef at a fancy restaurant, perhaps too regimented. Shaking up her life is her nine-year-old niece, whom she has to take in when her sister dies, and the new, much more spontaneous Italian co-chef she's forced to accommodate. Predictable complications ensure, but not before we see a dozen mouthwatering dishes being prepared. An American remake, "No Reservations" (2007), flopped.

"Babette's Feast" (1987): In a stark Danish village, a French political refugee becomes a housekeeper to two Puritan sisters. After some years, Babette wins the lottery and prepares an exotic feast with food from the outside world. We may enjoy such mouth-watering opulence, but the villagers have their moral doubts.

"Waitress" (2007): Keri Russell shines as a small-town waitress who sublimates her unsatisfied emotional and physical needs by baking pies, pies for every occasion, public and private. Totally wonderful.

"The Gold Rush" (1925) features one of the most famous "food" scenes is film history. Charlie Chaplin and Mack Swain play prospectors stranded in an isolated cabin in he Yukon. They have no food. So Charlie's Tramp boils a boot. Charlie eats his portion as if it was a gourmet feast.

"Le Grande Bouffe" (1973): Four middle-aged men tired of life decide to end it all gorging themselves to death with delicious food, exceptional hookers and French philosophy. Often mouthwatering, sometimes unpleasant, but it makes an impression.

"Volver" (2006): Less about food than the spirit of restaurants. Penelope Cruz re-opens a failed little Spanish bistro, which rejuvenates the entire neighborhood. Directed by the Spanish master Pedro Almodóvar.

"Eating Raoul" (1982): A way-offbeat comedy about disposing of a body culinarily. Not for all tastes, but a hoot anyway.

"The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover" (1989): Director Peter Greenaway's intense, odd film about the inner workings of a British restaurant. Every night, there's depravity and gluttony. And one night, a gruesome murder. But the food's always good to look at.

"Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?" (1978): The title of this entertaining film says it all. Silly but sumptuous.

Jon Stewart the 'most trusted'?

2009-08-09T19:39:00.000-07:00

==============================

By John Greenwald

Who knew that Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's "Daily Show" would emerge as the nation most trusted broadcaster after the recent death of Walter Cronkite, who previously held the title? Stewart picked up the honor in a Time magazine "click poll." (That's the name for polls conducted on the Web. I wouldn't call such polls reliable, unless they have tens of thousands of respondents. Time had 9410.

Time asked, "Now that Walter Cronkite has passed on, who is America's most trusted newscaster?" Stewart received 44 percent; NBC's Brian Williams, 29; ABC's Charlie Gibson, 19; and CBS's Katie Couric, only 7.

Time didn't put any of the cable news channels' stars among its choices. My guess is they didn't qualify because they're more opionators than straight newscasters are. The word "trust" doesn't apply to them as much entertainer, provocateur and "people I agree (or disagree) with." (To find the state-by-state results go to Time.com; on the Web page's right column is a link to its polls.)

The poll only confirmed what had to be a standing joke in America's newsrooms. Nate Beeler's editorial cartoon in The Washington Examiner said it all. A news broadcaster announces, "The most trusted man America has died ... ." An hysterical viewer yells, "But Jon Stewart was still so young and vivacious!!!"

While other editorial cartoons compared the sonorous "Uncle Walter" with cable TV's news screamers, the Web exploded with reaction to Time's poll. That Stewart, Cronkite and trust could be put in the same sentence caused umbrage, if not outright offense, among newspaper columnists and Web bloggers.

But Stewart's accession has less to do with his show, as with the decline of television news itself, as many writers have pointed out.

The big three networks' evening news programs have lost 50 percent of their audience since 1980. Where'd they go? Some went to cable news. But I think many more were lost to viewers' lifestyle changes: more women working; more single parents; longer work hours; more schlepping the kids around the suburbs; and the Web, for those still committed to news. Families used to eat dinner while watching in evening news. No longer.

And now, on my computer I get two New York Times e-mails a day with the news, plus breaking news e-mails; if I had an iPhone or similar gadget, I could receive them wherever I went.

If the TV news audience has been diffused, so has its quality.

In their day, the networks gave us straight news, which Cronkite personified. Yes, their morning shows watered it down after 7:30 a.m., with "soft" health, food, fashion and plain silly segments. Over time, even the evening news programs began to devote almost half their time to "news you can use" segments, from personal finance to personal health. Maybe valuable, especially reports that explain important issues, but not Cronkite's idea of substantive hard news. However, the evening news still gives us the best each network's news operations have, compacted into a tight 22 minutes.

Cable news went the other way. Despite their respective media conglomerates' resources, they don't have enough cash to fill their channels 24/7 news hole with the kind of coverage the networks spend 22 minutes on. That's why you see so many segments bereft of real reporting and filled instead with arguing talking heads.

Cable news has oozed into shows built around anchors. They're news personalities who entertain as much as inform -- engaging presenters, not straight reporters. For conservatives, there's the Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, with his smug takes on controversy. For liberals, there's MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, with his holier-than-thou rants. In the middle, there’s CNN's bland Wolf Blitzer. Meanwhile, all the news media lost credibility when it initially failed to nail down the Bush administration's errant claims about Iraq.

Into this maelstrom steps Jon Stewart. He's a liberal, but a non-partisan one. Even O'Reilly say he skewers all sides. Stewart understands the news. He finds hypocrisy, inconsistency, dishonesty, stupidity and demagoguery everywhere, especially in politics. Armed with DVRs tuned to all of C-SPAN, he, his interns (his "elves") and his writers, look for whatever's ripe for humor, satire, disbelief and outrage. And puns.

Stewart finds gobs of material in the cable shows themselves: their hyperbole of fear; their passion for ongoing or upcoming disasters, true or not; their love of false controversies; and their insane zeal for explosions in their graphics. In 2004, Stewart called CNN's since-cancelled "Crossfire" a phony, dangerous show. That made him "the only honest broker" in all TV news, writes one blogger.

But his specialty is tracking the statements of public officials as they weave in and out of contradictory positions. Did they forget what they said last week, or the week before that, or the previous month? Or, are they lying?

Stewart will run a half-dozen prevaricating clips with his hilarious double takes -- from amusement to sadness to outrage. Even the big networks now use this technique, without the asides.

A report of a senator's speech may be a fact, but adding them up tells the truth. That's what Stewart does -- truth beyond facts -- which is why in this era of so much nonsense in the news, his humor reveals reality so well.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

Pixels take over Hollywood

2009-08-08T18:59:00.000-07:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 463, Aug. 2, 2009

===============================

COMPUTER SPECIAL EFFECTS
TAKE OVER HOLLYWOOD

They may be nice to look at, but do they
make for motion pictures worth seeing?

By John Greenwald

-------

Coming soon!

PIXEL-MANIA!

Monsters so small no one can see them! And so large, they are eating Hollywood!

------

Like all movie ads, even this phony one has some truth buried within its hyperbole. Pixels are taking over the film industry for both better and worse. Because of pixels, we are seeing more spectacular-looking films (TV shows and TV commercials, too), and more boring, empty ones.

You've probably noticed computer-generated visual effects: an ever-increasing number of movies with stunning special effects -- from explosions that are impossible in real life to "characters" that exist only on a computer screen (all those Autobots in the two "Transformers" films).

Pixels are causing a major shift in moviemaking as Hollywood studios plan to produce more superhero pictures, because they make so much money. The film based on a back-of-the-shelf Marvel comic -- "Iron Man (2008) -- is set to become a franchise, in showbiz lingo, with the release of "Iron Man 2" in May 2010.

Film franchises used to be called series, pictures based on the same character: all those Frankenstein, Tarzan or Sherlock Holmes films, for example. They made good money, until the filmmakers' creative juices wore out or the public got bored.

But the first "Superman" film in 1978 changed that. From mere series, films based on comic-book heroes became blockbusters, turning in millions and millions at the box office. (The successful James Bond and Rocky films, where the lead character is more human than superhuman, are an exception.)

"Superman" has had four feature films, plus the "Smallville" TV series, which is set to begin its ninth season on the CW Network. Another blockbuster series is "Batman," with five movies, plus the "Catwoman" spinoff in 2004. The latest Batman, "The Dark Knight," grossed more than $1 billion worldwide.

Today, these films and so many others not only have digital special effects but depend on them.

Call them digital or computer special effects, they all must use the pixel -- computer-speak for "pix," as in the old newspaper term, "pictures," and "el," for element. A pixel is the smallest part of what you see on a computer screen: teeny, tiny dots or squares of colors arranged to make up larger images, from the text you type in an e-mail to a DVD you play on your PC. Computers organize pixels on our computer screens so we can see what's going on in them. You know something is wrong when a simple straight line gets all zigzagged or "pixilated."

But with more computer power available than ever, Hollywood is taking full advantage of audiences' desires to escape into larger than life, visually spectacular entertainment. Nothing wrong there, except producers and studios now have to find characters and stories big enough to build these new computer-enhanced films around.

"There are only 10 or 12 superhero characters that everybody in the world knows, and they're all taken," Jeff Gomez, of Starlight Runner Entertainment Inc., told the Wall Street Journal. "Now we have to find something that's new and fresh."

To find them, Hollywood executives and agents are searching comic-book conventions for new characters and their creators. These "comic-cons" were originally one-day events for fans to buy, trade and talk about their favorite comics. Now they're like last month's giant, four-day celebration in San Diego. There, studios and TV networks previewed their newest offerings for fans to get them ginned up -- from James Cameron's 3-D sci-fi adventure, "Avatar," to latest teasers from ABC's "Lost."

The big star at San Diego was a series of clips from "Avatar," Cameron's $200 million gamble that audiences will shell-out millions more to wear funny glasses to see a movie about humans battling aliens in outer space. Sounds exciting to me, but so did Robert Zemeckis's "Beowulf" (2007), a 3-D, computer-enhanced, half-live action, half-computer animated boring mess. The trick wasn't in the technology but in the storytelling, where it failed.

Still, the creators of such new comics as "4 Gun Conclusion" and "Fallout Toy Works" were hoping for deals with agents or studios, the Journal reported. Hollywood is even searching out smaller comic-cons to find characters unknown to the general public, but with the pixel-potential to draw audiences.

Are all these special effects, pixel-dependent movies enough to make a profit at the box office? No way, says Jerry Bruckheimer, one of Hollywood's most successful producers -- from the "CSI" TV franchise to the "Pirates of the Caribbean" film franchise.

Movie magic is "always about great storytelling and great characters," he told Time magazine. "When you see a really brilliant film, even though there's technique involved, you're not aware of it because the characters are so engaging."

All those pixels won't make movies any better. It doesn't matter if computers are used to create characters, as in the "Transformers" movies, or computers have kids flying on broomsticks in an airborne soccer match, as in the "Harry Potter" films. Relying on what Jerry Bruckheimer calls the "technique involved" doesn't assure films of either artistic or commercial success.

Only "great storytelling and great characters" make films worth seeing.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

Jon Stewart, Walter Cronkite and TV news

2009-08-08T18:36:00.000-07:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 464, Aug. 9, 2009

===============================

HOW DID JON STEWART BECOME THE 'MOST TRUSTED'?

TV news business changed, as the screamers
took over cable TV, right and left

By John Greenwald

Who knew that Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's "Daily Show" would emerge as the nation most trusted broadcaster after the recent death of Walter Cronkite, who previously held the title? Stewart picked up the honor in a Time magazine "click poll." (That's the name for polls conducted on the Web. I wouldn't call such polls reliable, unless they have tens of thousands of respondents. Time had 9410.

Time asked, "Now that Walter Cronkite has passed on, who is America's most trusted newscaster?" Stewart received 44 percent; NBC's Brian Williams, 29; ABC's Charlie Gibson, 19; and CBS's Katie Couric, only 7.

Time didn't put any of the cable news channels' stars among its choices. My guess is they didn't qualify because they're more opionators than straight newscasters are. The word "trust" doesn't apply to them as much entertainer, provocateur and "people I agree (or disagree) with." (To find the state-by-state results go to Time.com; on the Web page's right column is a link to its polls.)

The poll only confirmed what had to be a standing joke in America's newsrooms. Nate Beeler's editorial cartoon in The Washington Examiner said it all. A news broadcaster announces, "The most trusted man America has died ... ." An hysterical viewer yells, "But Jon Stewart was still so young and vivacious!!!"

While other editorial cartoons compared the sonorous "Uncle Walter" with cable TV's news screamers, the Web exploded with reaction to Time's poll. That Stewart, Cronkite and trust could be put in the same sentence caused umbrage, if not outright offense, among newspaper columnists and Web bloggers.

But Stewart's accession has less to do with his show, as with the decline of television news itself, as many writers have pointed out.

The big three networks' evening news programs have lost 50 percent of their audience since 1980. Where'd they go? Some went to cable news. But I think many more were lost to viewers' lifestyle changes: more women working; more single parents; longer work hours; more schlepping the kids around the suburbs; and the Web, for those still committed to news. Families used to eat dinner while watching in evening news. No longer.

And now, on my computer I get two New York Times e-mails a day with the news, plus breaking news e-mails; if I had an iPhone or similar gadget, I could them wherever I went.

If the TV news audience has been diffused, so has its quality.

In their day, the networks gave us straight news, which Cronkite personified. Yes, their morning shows watered it down after 7:30 a.m., with "soft" health, food, fashion and plain silly segments. Over time, even the evening news programs began to devote almost half their time to "news you can use" segments, from personal finance to personal health. Maybe valuable, especially reports that explain important issues, but not Cronkite's idea of substantive hard news. However, the evening news still gives us the best each network's news operations have, compacted into a tight 22 minutes.

Cable news went the other way. Despite their respective media conglomerates' resources, they don't have enough cash to fill their channels 24/7 news hole with the kind of coverage the networks spend 22 minutes on. That's why you see so many segments bereft of real reporting and filled instead with arguing talking heads.

Cable news has oozed into shows built around anchors. They're news personalities who entertain as much as inform -- engaging presenters, not straight reporters. For conservatives, there's the Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, with his smug takes on controversy. For liberals, there's MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, with his holier-than-thou rants. In the middle, there’s CNN's bland Wolf Blitzer. Meanwhile, all the news media lost credibility when it initially failed to nail down the Bush administration's errant claims about Iraq.

Into this maelstrom steps Jon Stewart. He's a liberal, but a non-partisan one. Even O'Reilly say he skewers all sides. Stewart understands the news. He finds hypocrisy, inconsistency, dishonesty, stupidity and demagoguery everywhere, especially in politics. Armed with DVRs tuned to all of C-SPAN, he, his interns (his "elves") and his writers, look for whatever's ripe for humor, satire, disbelief and outrage. And puns.

Stewart finds gobs of material in the cable shows themselves: their hyperbole of fear; their passion for ongoing or upcoming disasters, true or not; their love of false controversies; and their insane zeal for explosions in their graphics. In 2004, Stewart called CNN's since-cancelled "Crossfire" a phony, dangerous show. That made him "the only honest broker" in all TV news, writes one blogger.

But his specialty is tracking the statements of public officials as they weave in and out of contradictory positions. Did they forget what they said last week, or the week before that, or the previous month? Or, are they lying?

Stewart will run a half-dozen prevaricating clips with his hilarious double takes -- from amusement to sadness to outrage. Even the big networks now use this technique, without the asides.

A report of a senator's speech may be a fact, but adding them up tells the truth. That's what Stewart does -- truth beyond facts -- which is why in this era of so much nonsense in the news, his humor reveals reality so well.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

America's Last Most Trusted Newscaster

2009-08-08T13:00:00.000-07:00

===============================

AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society
Number 462, July 26, 2009

===============================

WHY CRONKITE WAS THE LAST MOST TRUSTED MAN

He reported, as America's icons -- from
politicians to presidents -- fell

By John Greenwald

How I first learned of the passing of Walter Cronkite reveals much about the news business in the 28 years since he retired as anchor of the "CBS Evening News."

I was driving home from a late movie -- a very late movie, the 2-hour, 33 minute "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" -- when I punched up a talk show on my radio. The host and his guest were reminiscing about Cronkite. During the half-hour I heard, neither of these two doofuses let on why they were taking about Cronkite. Maybe he had died, or maybe something else had happened.

When I got home, I quickly went to my computer -- not to the radio, nor to my TV. Broadcasting works in a linear fashion, one story after the other. Miss the one want, and I have to wait full cycle to catch up.

But on the Internet, I can find whatever I want just by Googling it. However, instead of Google, I went directly to one of the news aggregator sites I often use. These sites post headlines of major stories from around the world -- primarily the AP and mainstream print and broadcast news media.

Their headlines told the story: Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, was dead at 92.

That known, I went to my TV set where I instinctively tuned to cable news. I didn't even think to go to the CBS station where the nation and I learned to trust "Uncle Walter." On cable, the Fox News Channel and CNN were covering the story as best, and as predictably, as they could: They got out of bed people who knew the man -- Katie Couric, Brian Williams, Mike Wallace, Bob Schieffer and others. (Low-budget MSNBC ran their feverish documentaries about prison life.)

For an hour, I flipped between Fox and CNN and never even checked with the old networks. That's what it's like now in the post-Cronkite world. We have scores of choices for TV news, though I doubt if few viewers would consider most of them as reliable as the big three of Cronkite's day -- CBS, NBC and ABC. The only exception would be viewers so committed to a single political point of view they'd find unacceptable any of TV's big three newscasts.

Those 30-minute newscasts were an intensely compacted review of that day's world and national news. A headline service, really, which is what Cronkite called his program. And the show's public face (and voice and personality) was the anchorman's, a term first given to Cronkite when he headed CBS's coverage of the 1952 Republican National Convention.

America trusted Cronkite because that was not all we trusted in those post-war years. We trusted presidents and generals, captains of industry and labor leader's (depending on our occupational aspirations), and politicians, priests and parents. We even trusted newspapers, per the old saying, "They wouldn't print it if it wasn't true."

Cronkite was more than the most trusted man in America, he was the last most trusted man in America. Following him, our trusted icons fell to the ground. They were chipped and chomped by Vietnam and Watergate, the 1960s and the rest.

Cronkite saw himself as a reporter, which he was in his early days, covering World War II, including the Normandy invasion, for the United Press news service. At CBS, he moved from radio to TV, creating his anchor role, which he wasn't shy to call mere a "news reader," using the BBC term.

But Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," was even more accurate when he described Brian Williams, anchor of the "NBC Nightly News," as "one of America's most trusted teleprompter monkeys."

Cronkite was trusted because, like most of the reporting-based journalism of his time, he tried to be fair and balanced -- in the original meaning of that expression, not Fox News'. Today, the broadcast networks, are still locked into the daily, half-hour news format; except NBC, which also has a cable channel, MSNBC, for political news, and CNBC, for business news. There's more: on the right, the highly successful Fox News; on the left, MSNBC; in the center, CNN. Plus CSPAN's stenographic Capitol Hill coverage, and Fox's and Bloomberg's business channels.

Few of these cable news channels do the kind of reporting the broadcast networks once gave us, and still do. Real news reports are too expensive to do 24/7. Instead, cable news fills for hours with opinionated hosts agreeing with or yelling at innumerous talking heads squeezed into little boxes on your TV screen. In the post-Cronkite world of cable news, you can go all day seeing only what reflects your particular biases. You never have to be challenged with an independent-minded view.

Meanwhile, the Internet exists half in a world of straight news sites (CNN, CBS and ABC are the Web's top three news sites) and a cacophony of bloggers opinionating in their underwear.

Cronkite's journalism has been expanded to more news outlets and reduced to less news quality. No wonder he'll be missed.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

Sticking it to people

2009-07-22T19:34:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 461, July 19, 2009

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FROM 'CANDID CAMERA' TO
'BRÜNO,' WE GET PUNK'D

Sacha Baron Cohen is back, sticking it
to people on the screen and in theaters

By John Greenwald

Getting sucked into a movie or a novel so you're completely unaware of the world around you is one of the greatest achievements of storytellers. But what happens when a fictional world and the real world get mixed up together, not in the mind of a mentally ill person but on a street corner near you?

This is what Sacha Baron Cohen, the British comic writer and actor, does in his two "B" movies, "Borat" (it has a much longer title everyone ignores) and the newly released "Brüno." Both films are built around an actor, his character and situations that harshly rub reality and make-believe up against each other, so harshly that sparks erupt.

Cohen's films illustrate the concept of the "willing suspension of disbelief." It's a shorthand for how we process fiction -- how a story becomes a reality in our minds, sometimes so real we forget what's going on around us.

Cohen's shtick is a familiar one in American entertainment: place regular folks in unusual situations -- often with the aid of a provocateur or a trick device -- and see how they react. Most Americans became familiar with this concept in Allen Funt's long-running TV show, "Candid Camera." Funt's catch phrase, which he used when he revealed the practical joke to the bewildered victim, was "Smile! You're on candid camera!" It became even more familiar than today's "You just got punk'd!" is to the MTV generation.

As a kid, I remember watching one of Funt's most popular early stunts, the talking mailbox. (Back then, in U.S. cities, a mailbox was a government metal container about the size of a refrigerator in which people put their letters to be mailed -- "snail mail.")

Funt rigged the mailbox with a speaker, and across the street, he hid himself so he could see folks mailing their letters or just walking by. The "mailbox" would start talking to them. The gag was how they reacted -- from curious to dazed to enraged. Back then, few understood they were being fooled. Over time, with people's increased media sophistication, Funt's gags had to become more complicated, culminating in an elevator that actually ran sideways.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, "Candid Camera" was one of TV's most popular shows. The idea behind it, hidden-camera practical jokes, has been continued in such shows as the syndicated "TV's Bloopers & Practical Jokes" and MTV's "Punk'd." But Cohen's "Borat" and "Brüno" goes far beyond Funt's relatively tame stunts.

When we enter a movie theater, we're in a state of disbelief. We know what we're going to see on screen isn't real. We know that actors are playing make-believe. More so, we also know we're being manipulated by photography, editing, music, etc.

But we willingly suspend that disbelief, and within moments we accept what's on the screen as real. Well, maybe not as real as if we were in the middle of a bloody fistfight or making love to a knockout star, but real enough for our bodies to tremble in fear or our pulse rate to jump up. (Why we so willingly go into disbelief is another matter, better suited for psychologists and philosophers to explain, not entertainment columnists.)

Two generations ago, Allen Funt occupied that artistic place between disbelief and its willing suspension. Today it's Sacha Baron Cohen, and with a vengeance. Funt's goal was gentle fun; Cohen's is outrageous, gross-out humor that's so over the top, and often so disgusting to be beyond redemption. Yet, Cohen can be drop-dead hilarious, too.

He wants to push the envelopes of the people he meets across America and elsewhere. He wants to reveal their prejudices and bigotries. He's like a therapist who eschews talk therapy in favor of hitting people over the head with a club to shake out their most inner emotions -- for better and worse.

In "Borat," Cohen goes after anti-Semites; in "Brüno," it's homophobes. In both, he plays the "innocent": first an ignorant, bigoted reporter from Kazakhstan; and now a narcissistic Austrian fashionista. But instead of Funt's talking mailbox or sideways-moving elevator, Cohen plays characters that his "punk'd" victims believe are true. Chief among them is presidential candidate Ron Paul. Lord knows whom he thought he was visiting when he met Brüno in a hotel room. But when Brüno tries to seduce him, and obscenely at that, Paul stops being courteous and runs out like the room was on fire, muttering impolitic anti-gay epithets en route.

Cohen goes beyond revealing that politicians can be as repulsed by public displays of male homosexuality as redneck wrestling fans. He really wants to strike at the audience's prejudices -- in "Brüno's" case, the prejudices of libertarians' affection for Ron Paul and liberals' sense of superiority over American's white, rural poor.

In Cohen's films, there's always a question of who's to be believed and who's funnier -- the redneck outraged by Brüno turning the wrestling cage into his personal gay love nest, or the supercilious snob in the movie theater audience laughing at the redneck? And which one are you?

In the tension between disbelief and our willing suspension of it lays the practical joke, "Candid Camera" and "Brüno" -- the gentle, the filthy and the funny.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

America's fame machine

2009-07-22T19:31:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 460, July 12, 2009

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AMERICA'S FAME MACHINE --
A CENTURY OF POP ICONS

From the Gibson Girls to Michael Jackson,
the mass media turns stars into 'kings'

By John Greenwald

Michael Jackson's death last month greatly upset and saddened millions around the world. The news coverage of it also angered many (those who don't understand that news organizations sometimes have to give their customers news they want, not news that matters).

But Jackson is not the first American to reach the status of "king." There's the king of country music (Roy Acuff or George Strait, depending on your taste). And, of course, The King (Elvis Presley). And James Brown, the Godfather of Soul.

For a century, America has had figures from popular culture whose notoriety has equaled or exceeded that of political or government figures thanks to the mass media of their day -- what I call the "fame machine."

In 1905, Charles Dana Gibson, one of America's most famous illustrators, made a sensual and aloof pen and ink drawing of the profile of Evelyn Nesbit, a young artist's model and showgirl. She was either 16 or 18 at the time. He drew her long hair to resemble a question mark and entitled the work, "Women: the Eternal Question."

One of the artist's famed Gibson Girls series, the drawing became the most popular image of its day. They depicted strong and intelligent young women, though, drawn with a sensual delicacy. "[The Gibson Girls] delineated the American ideal of femininity at the turn of the century," says the Encyclopedia Britannica. Women copied Gibson Girls' fashions, hairstyles and even hair ribbons.

They were popular because they were printed in the major magazines of the day, such as Colliers and Life (then a humor magazine). Magazines were the mass medium of their time, the equivalent of TV and movies. In addition, Gibson merchandized his drawings the way today's animated films merchandize their characters. The drawings were printed in coffee table picture books, on plates, ashtrays, tablecloths, pillow covers and wallpaper for bachelor apartments, according to gibson-girls.com, Plays, songs and a movie were based on Gibson's girls.

Nothing similar dominated the national culture as "Women: the Eternal Question" until 1975, when every other American bachelor put the Farrah Fawcett poster on his walls.

Young Nesbit's life had its own dark turns, not dissimilar to Jackson's. She was simultaneously married to and a mistress of two of New York's richest, best-known, high society "players." When, in 1905 one killed the other in a fancy restaurant, it became "the trial of the century," decades before O.J.'s. An iconic Gibson Girl was now a "fallen woman" in the center of sex, sin and murder. Her story was turned into a 1907 silent film, "The Unwritten Law," a Cinemascope romance, "The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing" (1955), and was one of the storylines in "Ragtime" (1981).

As American media expanded -- from magazines to movies, from TV to the Internet -- public awareness of famous people expanded. In their time, Charlie Chaplin and Mohamed Ali were instantly recognizable around the world, as Michael Jackson is today.

Elvis was one of the creators of rock 'n' roll. The Beatles made rock a mass medium: pop. Jackson took Elvis' and James Brown's music and moves and turned them into his own thrilling and unique invention. He used an old medium, music, and a new one, videos, to reach ever-expanding crossover audiences.

People who are decade-long fans of performers say they "grew up" with them. But Jackson fans literally did. Jackson first appeared on Ed Sullivan's TV show back in 1969 when he was 10. Ten-year-olds who fell in love with him then are now 50. Parents shared their shock and grief over Jackson's passing with their children.

The American fame-making machine can be forgiving. For most of his life, Jackson's brilliance as a performer outweighed in the public mind his personal weirdness, especially his desire to look white and to create as an adult a childhood he never had.

On the other hand, some 70 years ago Americans, beset by the Great Depression, found themselves easily excited by and admiring of the bad guys. They were bank robbers and killers, such as John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and Baby Face Nelson. The fame machine of the day -- mainly newspapers and radio -- turned them from common criminals into Robin Hoods; and the newly formed FBI used the media to give them the additional status of "pubic enemies."

Michael Mann's new film, "Pubic Enemies," takes the position that people like Dillinger were in it for money, danger and thrills, plus the pleasure of shoving their rifles into the faces of the bank presidents. Dillinger frequently checked out newspaper and radio reports. In one scene, Dillinger watches a movie newsreel about him, complete with police photos of him. He wryly smiles.

Good guy or a bad guy, Brad Pitt or Bernard Madoff, if the mass media take an interest in you, you're a public figure, ready to be publicized, examined, exposed, over-praised and, even, destroyed. Jackson's been described in death as a sun that will never set. But Chaplin and Ali, once eternal touchstones, now are remembered mainly in passing.

America's fame machine will keep Jackson newsworthy for some months. But it eventually will let him go so it can make someone else famous.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

Action films, forever!

2009-07-17T15:07:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 459, July 5, 2009

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WHY ACTION FILMS DO SO WELL, DESPITE THE CRITICS

Movies like 'Transformers' are pure cinema,
unlike most pictures made today

By John Greenwald

The hundreds of thousands of people around the world who have paid a near-record $387 million to see "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" probably didn't know it was also the worse-reviewed movie so far this year.

The New York Times' explanation for this disparity between what the Times calls the film's "horrid" reviews and its boffo box office is "the power of sequels." But I don't think that's the correct explanation.

Certainly, the reviews were awful.

The Times reported that this sequel to 2007's "Transformers" "has received some of the worst reviews of the decade."

It quoted Roger Ebert, who described the new "Transformers" as "horrible," "unbearable," "meager" and "music of hell." Then the Times gleefully added, "that was just in [Ebert's] opening paragraph."

Rotten Tomatoes, the movie Website, gave this "Transformers" 20 out of 100 on its Tomatometer scale, based on its review of 199 film critics. (The first "Transformers" received a 57 on the Tomatometer.)

The New Yorker's film critic, David Denby, went after the picture's director, Michael Bay, personally, saying he was "stunningly, almost viciously, untalented."

But in its first five days (Wednesday through Sunday) of its opening last week, audiences around the world ignored critics and saw the film they wanted. This means "Transformers" could reach almost a billion dollars at the global box office, given that its predecessor took in $708 million.

Paramount Pictures, the film's distributor, ran exit polls at showings and learned that 90 percent of those polled said the new "Transformers" was as good as or better as the first, according to the Los Angeles Times. Nearly 67 percent ranked the film as "excellent," a higher score than even the new "Star Trek," one of this year's best-reviewed pictures (95 on the Tomatometer).

Some news reports explain the reason behind "Transformers'" great success is that it's a sequel. The New York Times' Brooks Barnes goes that route when he writes that "the moviegoing masses clearly get the most excited when they are not being surprised. ... The multiplex really rocks when movies are served up the McDonalds way: predictably and comfortably. 'Transformers' is definitely that."

But don't think sequels by themselves are why some films become monster hits. If that were the case, there'd be sequels of "Little Miss Sunshine" (2006) or "On the Waterfront" (1954).

No, the reason for the success of the two ""Transformers" films are both are action movies.

If you believe, as I do, that at its heart, cinema is image, movement and sound (and by sound, I don't meant dialogue, which most modern films have too much of).

Under this definition, action films are pure cinema. The best ones have striking cinematography filmed high on mountain ranges or hanging from low-flying airplanes, or close to the ground on Egyptian deserts or in the streets of Manhattan. Chase scenes are set in the many levels of ugly, dangerous, abandoned factories.

There's always movement. The objects in front of the cameras move. There are the characters and cars and, in the case of the "Transformers" films, giant mechanical monsters made of gazillions of exposed parts. Think of Arnold Schwarzenegger during his Mr. Universe Days now re-engineered by a sculptor using only the makings of a thousand Chevys and Mack Trucks.

Whether they're giant, lumbering autobots or just scared-silly humans escaping killers in spy thrillers, the characters must always move in pure cinema.

To gain further movement, so must the camera. Thanks to new mechanical and digital technologies, cameras can swoop and turn, fly up, over and around objects and people. I can't recall a single static shot in this "Transformers" film. Even when the characters are moving, so is director Bay's camera.

Finally, the sound.

Sure, action films require bone-rattling noise, especially to match the eye-searing explosions. But more than loud, sound needs to be intense, with a rich range of frequencies, like a symphony orchestra. The music must expand on the emotions created by the rest of the film, and help to build the many dramatic arcs that sustain a good action picture. Dialogue is least important: a smattering of conversation to set up the film's conflicts; a little humor; maybe romance. And lots of hoots, hollers, yells and screams.

But if this is pure cinema, what is the rest of cinema, say these films nominated for the 2009 Oscars: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "Frost/Nixon," "The Reader" and "Slumdog Millionaire"? They all began life as short stories, plays and novels. In fact, most films, if not actually adopted from literary sources, are in essence closer to a short story or play than a truly cinematic movie.

It's easier and cheaper to film dialogue-heavy movies. Why have your heroes and villains madly chasing within a crowd of innocent bystanders in an airport, with one or two cameras running and flying around with them, when you can fill up movies with characters talking on a few sets and the camera on a little tripod?

As human beings, we want movies about us. But those kinds of pictures don't exploit film's unique properties: image, movement and sound. The "Transformers" films exploit the elements of true cinema more than any Woody Allen film.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

Why fictional characters are so important

2009-07-17T14:50:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 458, June 28, 2009

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WHY FICTIONAL CHARACTERS
ARE SO IMPORTANT TO US

An encyclopedia of them reveals the
intensity of our love for made-up people

By John Greenwald

What a silly title for a book, I thought, "The Encyclopedia of Fictional People," especially given its pompous subtitle, "The Most Important Characters of the 20th Century" (it was published in 1995). Who would care about fictional characters when there were so many real ones to occupy our attention?

Until I started thumbing through the book.

There I found people who had been a part of my life, sometimes an unforgettable part -- maybe for a few hours, maybe for many years. Some were silly people, such as Alley Oop, a comic strip character of my youth (the encyclopedia calls him, "the people's Neanderthal." Or serious people, such as Tom Hagen, "the voice of reason and moderation" in godfather Vito Corleone's family.

Some names I recognized right away. Say, Mike Hammer, the private eye who's "as hard-boiled as a thirty-minute egg." He's from writer Mickey Spillane's "I, the Jury." (The encyclopedia's compiler, Seth Godin, thoughtfully provided source material for the more than 2,000 entries.) Or Opie Taylor, "Norman Rockwell's American boy come to life," in "The Andy Griffith Show."

Other names jiggled my fading memory. Tony Nelson, the astronaut and "reluctant master of a genie named Jeannie," from "I Dream of Jeannie." Or, the two Jenny's -- the Jenny who's Forest Gump's lifelong friend, and Jenny, who's the knockout blonde from "10."

Going through the encyclopedia reminded me of how many fictional characters had stuck with me years after I first met them.

Harold, the "dark brooding young man obsessed with dying," from "Harold and Maude." Joe, the alcoholic business executive in "Days of Wine and Roses." Fred Johnson, who I really only knew as the one-armed man in "The Fugitive." Sophie Zawistowska, a Holocaust survivor living in Brooklyn, who has a terrible secret.

Ellie Andrews, the runaway heiress in "It Happened One Night." Ronny Camareri, the "hotheaded, romantic baker," and his love, the "pretty, pragmatic" Loretta Castorini, both from "Moonstruck." Clarence, "a celestial apprentice, desperate to earn his angel's wings," from "It's a Wonderful Life." And Data, the "perfectly sentient android who seems in all ways human except that he lack emotions," from "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

Compiler Seth Godin and his 28 contributors did an ace job writing concise, pithy entries. They researched hundreds and hundreds of comic books, radio and TV series, novels and movies; plus a few advertising characters, such as the Green Giant (who "found life in juvenile fairy tales and opted for a more challenging career in marketing canned and frozen vegetables").

It turns out this encyclopedia wasn't silly at all. Some of these characters are as real to us as people we see in the news, maybe even more so. For one thing, we often know more about fictional characters. We intimately experience them in books, movies, even comic strips, where they can become complicated and compelling.

We see real people, especially public ones, at a distance, usually in formal settings such as press conferences. We see U.S. senators as well as sitcom characters on TV, but we experience the latter more intimately, as if they were family or friends.

When it comes to fictional characters, none can beat Sherlock Holmes. Created by Scottish writer Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887, Holmes became "the most enduring character of detective fiction," says the Encyclopedia Britannica. When Doyle killed off Holmes in 1893, the outcry was so huge that Doyle resurrected him in 1902.

Since then, Holmes has appeared on stage, in movies (especially those starring Basil Rathbone), on TV and radio and in comic books (including the 50th anniversary issue of "Detective Comics," where Holmes -- now 135 years old -- and Batman defeated the descendants of Holmes' arch enemy, Professor Moriarty). For Christmas, expect to see another Holmes movie, this one with Robert Downey Jr., as Holmes, and Jude Law as Holmes' companion, Dr. Watson.

Adoration of Holmes continues in the 21st century, with thousands of devotees gathering in Baker Street Irregulars societies around the world to discuss the man, his cases and his world. Doyle created a fascinating figure over 56 short stories and four novels. Besides being a brilliant observer and detective, Holmes was complex, moody and a manic-depressive drug addict. A character to get your teeth into.

Why the importance of fictional characters in our lives?

Because they're created by artists and entertainers who understand our need to imagine people outside of our day-to-day world. Whether we want to emulate them or to despise them, to passively admire them or actively copy their behavior, to laugh at them or with them, we bring them into our lives to expand our own. Whether they're ennobling or frightening or, like sitcom characters, just plain comfortable to be with, we make them part of our lives.

Indeed, since earliest humans told stories around the night fire, fictional characters have been part us. Today, they mainly entertain us, but the best ones inhabit our cultural and moral universe. The worst ones repel us, but the best enlighten us.

PS: The encyclopedia is out of print, but many bookstore Websites have copies for sale.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

Characters' codes of honor

2009-06-19T16:36:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 457, June 21, 2009

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IN 1953, MOVIE CHARACTERS
HAD A CODE OF HONOR

By comparison, today's public, private and
political 'elites' ignore those codes

By John Greenwald

Today's column is about honor, morality and doing the right thing. I'll try not to get on a high horse on this subject, though it's pretty easy to ride high, given how so many of our business, religious, political and, some would say, media elites have fallen off their own ethical horses.

I got thinking about these issues after watching "Roman Holiday," one of 1953's biggest hits. It received 10 Academy Award nominations, including for best picture and best director (William Wyler). It won three Oscars -- for best actress (Audrey Hepburn), motion picture story (Dalton Trumbo) and best black and white costumes (Edith Head).

It was filmed in the streets of Rome, when location shooting for studio-bound Hollywood was rare. A bitter-sweet romantic comedy, it stars a sparkling Hepburn, in her American film debut, and Gregory Peck, one of America's most stalwart leading men.

Hepburn plays a beautiful, young princess from one of those anonymous European countries endemic to Hollywood. She's in Rome at the end of a long and exhausting goodwill tour of the continent's cities. By now, she's sick of representing her country in trade meetings and exhibitions, of visiting factories, of taking trips to hospitals and orphanages, etc. She's also fed up with her handlers, who keep her to long days, exhausting schedules and no time for herself. Enough with the stiff spine, half-smiles and the same few words of thanks.

So, in her next to last night in Rome, she throws an angry fit against her handlers. They in turn have her injected with a sedative and leave her to sleep. But before she conks out, she escapes her embassy palace for the streets and a little freedom. Soon enough, she's passed out on a bench.

Peck, playing an American news agency reporter based in Rome, discovers her there. Not knowing who she is, and unable to learn where she's living, he half drags her to his tiny apartment where he deposits her on his couch. In the morning, he leaves her still sleeping to check in at the office. There he discovers Hepburn's true identity.

This could be a career-making, high-paying story. So long as she doesn't know who he is, he could guide her around the city and in the process learn about her secret wishes and desires: "The Inner Life of Europe's Princess Ann." Because a story like this needs photos, he enlists the help of photographer-friend Eddie Albert and his miniature cameras.

Once Hepburn awakens, the two begin their little holiday. She pretends she's an unknown touring the Eternal City; he pretends he's a businessman taking the day off to show her whatever the wants.

So the heart of this joyous and delightful film begins. They walk Rome's quirky streets, sit at cafes, and see the plazas and fountains. She gets a haircut, which further disguises her. She takes a wild ride on one of Rome's ubiquitous motor scooters. She's having the time of her life. Meanwhile, Peck takes copious mental notes, and Albert takes scores of secret photos.

At night, they go to a dance held on river barges. While they dance, we see how much they are falling in love.

Her country's agents suddenly appear to drag her away, but the three escape. Hepburn knows she has to go back to being a princess, though an older and wiser one. And so does Peck, still not revealing his true identity. They share a moving, deeply held, last kiss.

The next day, at her final press conference, she sees Peck and Albert and realizes who they are. But they don't reveal their earlier adventure; Albert even hands over a small envelop of photos he took the day before. Peck innocuously asks her which city she liked best on her tour. After a moment's thought, she answers "Rome," looking right at him with a little smile that could melt the Mona Lisa.

Peck leaves knowing he's done the right thing, preserving Hepburn's privacy even at the expense of his own fortune and career. The film swells with romance and honor unseen in today's highly sexed, but ultimately stupid, comedies.

Can you imagine any contemporary journalist or paparazzi giving up such a scoop, especially in our celebrity "trashmag" environment? The 1950s were a time of social and cultural repression, but they also were a time of standards. Watching "Roman Holiday," I realized we have lost both.

I could fill a dozen columns listing the transgressions over the last 30 years of our private and public leaders and institutions. Only last Tuesday, U.S. Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), admitted to having an extramarital affair with a campaign aide. When running for the senate, he denounced then-President Clinton, who was in the middle of the Lewinsky affair. Ensign also voted for the anti-gay marriage Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution (it lost).

The behavior of the characters in "Roman Holiday" may not have reflected the day-to-day behavior of many Americans then, but it reflected the ideal. Today, dishonorable conduct requires only saying you're sorry, hiring a lawyer to avoid prison, and "moving on."

Measuring "Roman Holiday" against today's popular morality, there's a part of me that prefers 1953.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

Addicted

2009-06-10T19:44:00.001-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 456, June 14, 2009

===============================

HOOKED ON HOLLYWOOD’S
SUMMER BLOCKBUSTERS

Why these movies make me want to see
them, even when most are so bad

By John Greenwald

During the last month I've felt liked a drug addict going to meet my connection for a weekly fix. My connection wasn't some scary guy huddling in a dark alley but a bright, young ticket-taker in a neon lit multiplex movie lobby.

Week after week, I was compelled to see Hollywood's latest summer blockbuster. I'd see these pictures whether they were any good or not, even if I'd read awful reviews. I needed them the same way cigarette smokers crave more drags of nicotine, alcoholics had to have more shots of vodka, or coke heads hungered for another line to snort.

I know the date my 20090 summer Hollywood blockbuster addiction began: Friday, May 1, with the opening of "X-Men Origins: Wolverine."

The following weekend beginning Friday, May 8, "Star Trek" premiered. And so it went: "Angels & Demons" (May 15); "Terminator Salvation" (May 21); "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian" (May 22); "Up" (May 29); and "Land of the Lost" (June 5).

Those are just the films I saw; others opened, too. As of this writing, I've yet to decide on this weekend's flick: "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3," the action thriller set in the New York subways; or the Eddie Murphy comedy "Imagine That," about an over-scheduled businessman and his cute little daughter. Depending on the reviews, I might see both.

For the following weekends, Hollywood is setting me up for more movies to feed my addiction.

* June 19: The Sandra Bullock romantic comedy, "The Proposal"; or the Jack Black adventure comedy, "Year One."

* June 24: The sci-fi actioner, "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," with Shia Labeouf, a young Mr. Dreamy; or the child-with-cancer family drama starring Cameron Diaz, "My Sister's Keeper."

* July 1: The third in the animated series, "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs"; or the crime drama "Public Enemies," starring Johnny Depp as the Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger.

This takes me only through the July 4th weekend. There's much more to come. "Bruno" (July 10), with Sacha Baron Cohen doing his "Borat" shtick, only a little differently. "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" (July 15)-- 'nuff said. "G-Force," an animated adventure (July 24). "Funny People," an Adam Sandler comedy (July 31).

Then the blockbuster-type films start to peter out in favor of more normal pictures, like "Julie & Julia" (Aug. 7), from a book by a woman who spent a year of her life making every recipe in Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." And "Inglourious Basterds," Quentin Tarantino's violently exaggerated take on World War II movies (Aug. 21).

Hollywood's summer release season once began on or about the July 4th weekend. Then the studios moved it forward to Memorial Day and now to the first weekend in May.

Why? Because Hollywood needs more time to sell these outrageously expensive movies to us. They cost upwards of $200 million, plus often a nearly equal amount for marketing and publicity. Call them summer blockbusters or summer tentpoles, they have to build buzz -- viewer excitement -- to sell those first $100 million worth of tickets the first week. It can cost at least $100 million to pump the necessary amount of publicity into the zeitgeist so we want to see each picture.

If you consume any kind of media, from The New York Times to the National Enquirer, from "Fox and Friends" in the morning to "The Daily Show" at night, you know about most of these films. Okay, you won't hear about them on Rush Limbaugh, unless he finds some errant political content in one. But you're sure to hear about some on NRP.

At the beginning of this column, I listed the six films I've seen from May 1 to June 5. Of those six, I thought only two were any good: "Star Trek" and "Up." That didn't stop me seeing the others, even when I knew going in what their deficiencies would be. You don't need reviews to warn you. The previews themselves can reveal just how tacky and witless a movie will be (see previews of "Land of the Lost" for example).

So why do I go? Why I am so addicted to these summer blockbusters? Does the summer dumb me down? Does the extra hype and forced buzz get my own film-going juices going, albeit artificially, and for films not worthy of my time, interest and cash?

I'd answer yes to all of the above.

What makes these films so addictive is not their quality but their clichés. The action must be fast, fast, fast and just violent enough for the intended audience (G to R). The heroes must be vulnerable, and the villains need memorable, quotable dialogue. The special effects must be beyond imagining, otherwise why would they be special?

Indeed, more than the plot or characters, special effects in blockbusters must be jaw-dropping. Summer tentpoles must take you to places you couldn't ever envision. When these films fail, it's usually because the effects and the action don't leave us floored in amazement.

These films must take me outside of my head, especially after the long New England winter. No wonder they're so addictive, like real dope.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

Hooked on blockbusters

2009-06-10T19:44:00.000-07:00

Sequels, prequels, remakes

2009-06-03T20:24:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 455, June 7, 2009

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SUMMER FILMS THIS FAR:
SEQUELS, PREQUELS, REMAKES

More Terminators, Night Museums, Ice
Ages, Star Treks and Transformers.

By John Greenwald

Moviegoers are used to sequels. We know the drill. A film is a big hit and, if it has strong, popular characters, it earns a sequel. "Iron Man" was a surprise hit last year, so there will be an "Iron Man 2" next year. Not bad for a relatively minor Marvel comics hero.

Sometimes a movie is such a surprising hit that two sequels are filmed at once. The original "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" came out in July 2003. Its two sequels, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End," were filmed together but released in July 2006 and in May 2007, respectively. In between, in May 2006, there was the video game, "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Legend of Jack Sparrow." And a "Pirates of the Caribbean 4" film is being planned for 2012. With pirate captain Jack Sparrow a permanent ghost, this series can go on forever.

At least the "Pirates" films occur one after the other. They're true sequels. But this summer, we have sequels, prequels, origin films and time travel films. Plus a few remakes. You'll have to wait for the fall for originality from Hollywood.

This summer's sequels and prequels, remakes and time travelers are a confusing bunch.

First, there are the remakes. Will Ferrell stars in his comic, action, special effects re-do of the kids' TV show "Land of the Lost," which ran for two seasons on NBC from 1974-1976. Later this summer, we have "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3," an action-thriller set in the New York subways. The excellent 1974 original pitted Walter Matthau against Robert Shaw. The new one stars Denzel Washington and John Travolta.

Next, there are the standard sequels: "Terminator Salvation"; "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian"; "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" (opening June 24); "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" (July 1); and "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" (July 15).

"Night" and "Transformers" are follow-ups to their originals. "Ice Age" is the third in this animated series. And I've lost track which "Harry Potter" this is.

Then we have the prequels. "Star Trek" (plain "Star Trek," without numbers, Roman numerals or colons) takes place before the original TV series and movies. We're introduced to the original TV characters as they join the crew of the Starship Enterprise as young men and women. We see how they become the iconographic figures that have been a major part of our popular culture for the last 40 years. Director J.J. Abrams pulls off a tricky narrative stunt here, characters who are new but become more familiar as the film advances.

"X-Men Origins: Wolverine" takes Wolverine, the most interesting character of the three "X-Men" films, and creates a complicated origin story for him. He's part werewolf and part cyborg who "Hulks out" when angry. Compared to the sophistication and emotional resonance of "Star Trek," "Wolverine" is a dull thud.

"Angels & Demons" is both sequel and prequel. It's based on Dan Brown's Vatican thriller of the same name. Brown's next novel was "The Da Vinci Code," a monster hit with the same main character and similar themes as "Angels." But "Da Vinci" was filmed first, "Angels" second. So which is first depends on whether you had read the books or saw the movies.

And finally we have the time traveler films.

All the "Terminator" movies revolve around time travel: In the future, a "self-aware" computer network takes upon itself the mission of killing off all humanity. It sends to the past (our present) a cyborg to kill the future mother of the man who will lead the underground resistance against the computers. "Terminator Salvation" ties up some the first three pictures' many loose ends but leaves room for more sequels to follow. Plus, it features a teenage father and his grownup son in the same scenes, also known as messing with the same time space continuum. In the new "Star Trek," director J.J. Abrams uses time travel, too.

I have mixed feelings about time travel plots. Used well it can add touching or even emotional elements to a story. Used badly, it's just a confusing gimmick for writers to trick out a tale. No matter how time travel is used, it's still a stunt that may be an intriguing thought experiment but ultimately is just a cheap trick. Time travel, at least in the real world, doesn't make sense. Even in the crazy world of movies, it still doesn't make sense. That won't stop screenwriters from slipping it into their pictures.

Sequels and prequels are filled with repetition -- the same characters often in similar situations. So lazy writers throw time travel into them for a cheap 'n' easy plot twist.

Sequels and remakes, which have dominated the movie summer season, are double-edged swords. They suffer from a lack of originality, offering viewers the same-old, same-old characters and stories.

But audiences also want to see their favorites all over again. There are the reasons why they like "Pirates'" Jack Sparrow so much in the first place, and in the second and third. They will not be denied.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

Films influence lives

2009-06-02T20:45:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 454, May 31, 2009

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HOW FILMS CAN INFLUENCE
FAMOUS PEOPLE'S LIVES

From scientists to stars, from '2001' to
'Gone with the Wind,' movies touch lives

By John Greenwald

Have you ever seen a movie that changed your life?

This is a question most people don't even think about, I suppose, except those in the arts. But when asked, it's fascinating how many realize that a movie, a mere movie, had a major impact on their lives.

Variety, the showbiz newspaper and magazine, asked 120 prominent people to name the movie that changed their lives and compiled their answers in a new book, "Variety's 'The Movie that Changed My Life': 120 Celebrities Pick the Film that Made a Difference (for Better or Worse)."

Most of that title is showbiz hyperbole. First, almost all of those interviewed aren't celebrities in the Paris Hilton sense but are people of true accomplishment. They're leaders in a wide variety of fields from entertainment (director Sidney Pollack), to medicine (Dr. Sanjay Gupta), to science (Neil deGrasse Tyson, head of New York's Hayden Planetarium and host of PBS' "Nova"), to politics (John McCain), to finance (CNBC's James Cramer), to literature (novelist Anne Rice), and history (historian Doris Kearns Goodwin). Maybe half interviewed are in showbiz.

Also, book isn't a list of 120 famous people and the titles of a few life-changing pictures. Rather, it's a series of short essays by Variety editors about the movies their subjects love, those that have stuck with them since childhood, those that have influenced their thinking or they identify with, and films they just treasure.

The book reveals movies' emotional clout. Most of the 120 interviewed, writes Robert Hofler, the book's overall author, "see movies as a powerful medium, one that gets under the skin and goes straight to the soul to shape dreams, aspirations, and attitudes in a way that changes who were are."

Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), was named the most (seven times), ranging from "Nova's" Tyson to CNN's Larry King. "Gone with the Wind" (1939) got thumbs up from civil war historian Goodwin and conservative commentator Phyllis Schlafly, and six total mentions.

Conservative and former Republican speaker of the House Newt Gingrich listed many civil war films among his favorites -- especially Edward Zwick's "Glory" (1989), about a unit of former slaves that fought for the Union, and Gordon F. Maxwell's "Gettysburg" (1993). Many of director John Ford's cavalry films still stay with him, "Fort Apache (1948), for example.

But Gingrich adds, "my entire career in politics was sparked" by a grade-B African adventure, "Trader Horn" (1931). He saw it as a kid in Harrisburg, Penn., and was so excited by the animals he went to city hall to petition for a zoo. The petition failed, but it got him a front-page story in the local paper. The rest is political, and publicity, history.

We all see what we want in films. In the 1959 Lana Turner plush soaper "Imitation of Life," a black woman tries to pass for white. Rev. Jesse Jackson saw a movie about race, but fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi saw only "dresses, dresses, dresses."

This book is filled with similar stories, all revealing the unique power of movies -- if not to change our lives then at least to seriously influence them, often more that we think.

-- 30 --

THE TWO FILMS THAT
CHANGED MY LIFE

One night my father stopped me from doing my junior high homework Instead, I was to watch a movie on TV. Homework was almost sacrosanct in my household, so substituting it for a mere movie was almost as sacrilegious.

The film he made me see was "Citizen Kane" (1941), and it was unlike anything I had seen. What blew my mind, to use an expression of a later generation, were director and co-writer Orson Welles' story-telling and filmmaking techniques. I had never seen a movie tell the same story from the points of view of different characters. It made me think about characters and stories in a brand new way.

And then there were Welles' filmmaking techniques. The camera angles -- high and low; the camera movement; the overlapping dialogue; the ceilings -- few movies showed ceilings in those days; the rich black and white photography that seemed more true to life that color. And all melded together in an exciting, revealing whole. I didn't know motion pictures could do that. Even today, few still do.

"Kane" definitely lead me to loving films and to writing about them for most of my professional life.

I saw the other life-changing film just a few years later, Walt Disney's "Fantasia" (1941), in one of its re-releases. I went to see the cartoon, but I left hearing the music. Disney's radical experiment of mixing animation with classical music made me realize there was a creative world I knew nothing about. For the first time, a movie made me pay attention to the music.

My parents didn't have a mono LP record player (stereo didn't exist then), so I went to the local library, which had a portable player and many of the records Disney used. So I sat in a corner with an earpiece in my ear hearing the music, over and over. Thus began my lifelong love of classical music, which might never have happened except for "Fantasia." -- John Greenwald

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

Trashmags

2009-05-09T16:10:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 453, May 10, 2009

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WHAT 'TRASHMAGS' DREAM UP FOR BRANGELINA

Celebrity magazines say Pitt and Jolie
always are breaking up, facts be dammed

By John Greenwald

It was the inch and a half tall headline type on the cover of inTouch Weekly for sale at the checkout lane that caught my attention:

BRAD
MOVES
OUT

It ran in bright yellow alongside a photo of actor Brad Pitt (as if shoppers didn't know who "Brad" was). He wasn't smiling. In a corner of the cover, there was a separate photo of his lover/paramour/partner/mother-of-children Angelina Jolie. A cover-subhead explained the main head: "Angelina begs him to stay for their kids, but Brad has already packed his belongings from their home in France."

This story was no surprise.

Brad and Angelina met four years ago during the shooting of "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" (2005). They played an unhappily married couple who were assassins working secretly and separately for different companies; they're assigned to kill each other. In the process, their characters fall in love all over again. Movies like this depend on the chemistry of the stars and, as critic Roger Ebert wrote, "Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have it." On screen, and in real life.

They're still are together. As of this writing, they have six children, three adopted, three biological. They are heavily invested in American and international charity work, giving time and six- and seven-figure donations, including $13 million to their own foundations.

Still, during these four yeas, the celebrity magazine industry has been saying Brangelina, as they call the couple, are breaking up. One week it's inTouch, a month later maybe it's Star, another month the National Enquirer. Do the editors secretly get together to decide who's going to run a Brangelina break-up story and when?

Actually, it can't be too secret, as two companies own most of these magazines: American Media, Inc., and Bauer Publishing. Besides celebrity magazines, they also publish lifestyle, women's, health, fitness, teen and food magazines.

The celebrity magazines once were called supermarket tabloids, but I prefer "trashmags," because their hearts still are in the trash.

Take the "Brad Moves Out" story. It's a well-crafted narrative mixing scene-setting, action, even quotes. Yet, I don't believe a word. Nothing in this article -- no quote, no paraphrase, no observation -- is attributed to a named source.

Here are the sources: "a behind-the-scenes source," "a friend," "locals," "a family friend," "a confident," "a source," "an insider" and "a close friend." And, Gilda Carle, Ph.D., author of the e-book "99 Prescriptions for Fidelity" ($33 from her Web site). Dr. Gilda, as inTouch calls her, who's never actually treated the couple, has a good idea how the relationship will end up: Not good.

But Brad never really left Angelina. In its next issue, inToucb "reports" that he returned nine days later. The magazine's cover yells, "BRAD TAKES THE KIDS." Turns out he took the kids to Niagara Falls, near where Angelina was shooting a film, for a trip on the Maid of the Mist.

For four years, Jolie and Pitt have had to put up with this trash -- groups of writers, editors and photographers making up articles that their family is doomed. I say "making up" because within these stories there's no evidence they're true -- except, maybe, the blurry photos of Pitt and two of his children on the Maid. There aren't even bylines on this or any other story in the magazine, as if a committee of cowards wrote it. Even the granddaddy of trashmags, the Enquirer, has bylines, and it names an occasional source or two.

Yes, fans are fascinated by the stars. This has been true since Hollywood's earliest days. A hundred years ago, producers tried to keep the identities of their leading actors a secret. They figured once the public knew who their stars really were, they'd demand the studios pay them more money or they'd move to another studio. The producers were right, as today's biggest stars had commanded $20 million a picture, at least until the recession lowered what studios would pay.

It's easy to forget, especially in supermarket checkout lines, that stars have real jobs. They're artists whose work in films, TV, music, theater and other fields entertains and moves us. Because their performances so touch us, it's natural to want to know more about them.

But something's wrong when these magazines appear to use little more than wishful thinking to "report" a ruined relationship. In truth, the facts are that Jolie and Pitt have bonded to create a large, loving family. Their creative work in films has enable them to give their own time and millions of dollars to important causes around the world -- from refugee camps in Africa to building news homes in New Orleans' poorest wards.

Sure, like most relationships and marriages in America, the odds are they will break up, eventually -- maybe three months, or three years or 30 years from now. Whenever that happens, if that happens, inTouch will claim, "we told you so." This assumes the trashmags still are around. Even before the recession, they were suffering from declining circulation and ad revenue, like all other print media.

One top editor in the business thinks these magazines should be upbeat and supportive of the stars. That's what readers now want, he says. It certainly would make food shopping more pleasant.

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

Newspapers and Film

2009-05-09T15:48:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 452, May 3, 2009

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NEWSPAPERS AND FILM STILL
ARE THE BEST OF FRIENDS

Since the earliest talkies, newsrooms
have been excellent places to set movies

By John Greenwald

Suppose it's 1927, and you're running a Hollywood movie studio. A competitor, Warner Bros., premieres the film "The Jazz Singer" starring Al Jolson, one of the most dynamic vaudevillians of the day. It's called a "talkie," even though most of the film is silent, without spoken dialogue. But a few scenes have dialogue and song, especially one where Jolson says to a nightclub audience, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain't heard nothing yet." That was one of the most famous ad-libs in film history.

Many in Hollywood say talkies are a fad, but audiences demand them. There are many technical issues to resolve, among them where to put (and hide) the microphone. Famed director Cecil B. DeMille solves that by hanging the mic from a broom handle held aloft by a soundman, thereby inventing the boom mic.

There are two major creative problems to solve: expanding Hollywood's pool of pantomime actors to include those who could speak dialogue into those mics; and finding writers to write dialogue for those actors.

Finding actors isn't too difficult. You raid Broadway and London for all the theater actors you can find. But I suspect finding writers is more of a problem. Broadway playwrights are used to running shows by custom or contract.

You don't want writers as persnickety as playwrights working in their writers' factories(disguised as bungalows on the studio lot). But you quickly find a group of writers eager to sell their souls to Hollywood: newspaper reporters. They are used to meeting three or four deadlines a day, to fashioning exciting, coherent narratives rich with characters, dialogue and plot twists -- often from just the barest of details. Also, working for idiot movie producers and directors was little different than working for idiot publishers and editors.

Better yet, the pay was much, much more, sometimes by a factor of 10.

The best known and highest paid screenwriter was Ben Hecht (1894-1964). With fellow Chicago newspaperman Charles MacArthur, he co-wrote the classic Broadway newspaper comedy, "The Front Page" (1928), which has been turned into three films and a TV movie. He wrote a score of other pictures for Hollywood's best directors, and was an anonymous script doctor for many more. It took him two to eight weeks to complete a screenplay; and he once earned $100,000 for two scripts he wrote in a month.

Newswriting perfectly prepared journalists for talkies, and no wonder so many were set in newsrooms. Like hospitals and police stations, newsrooms are where people's lives intersect, usually under crisis. They're also a hothouse environment, ripe for personality clashes, romances, sex and fistfights. (For a few examples, see sidebar story, "Stop Press, Role Film," below.)

Two new films illustrate how Hollywood still loves newspapers, and romanticizes them:

* "State of Play" is a paranoid political thriller set in Washington, D.C. A local reporter (a slovenly Russell Crowe) digs a little deeper into the death of a young congressional aid. Turns out she was having an affair with her married boss, a fast-rising congressman played by a stiff Ben Affleck. He's investigating a Blackwater-Halliburton-type company that wants to control America's entire homeland security apparatus. It's an okay thriller, but a six-hour 2003 BBC miniseries from which it's adapted is three times better.

* Angeles Times writer Steve Lopez's columns about Nathaniel Ayers, a brilliant cellist whose career was destroyed by mental illness. Lopez finds Ayers homeless and playing on the streets. Both men are trapped -- Lopez by his emotional disengagement from life, Ayers by his paranoid schizophrenia. Lopez's columns awaken the city to its hellhole of a Skid Row. To illustrate how Beethoven makes Ayers feel, director Joe Wright uses psychedelic special effects and shots of pigeons jubilantly flying over L.A. Despite moments of melodrama, the film moved me. Its depiction of how columnists work is spot on.

The newspaper industry may be in deep doo-doo, and local TV stations may be cutting news staffs even as they increase their news shows' hours. Both these movies pay attention to the industry's financial trouble. Yet, Hollywood still likes setting its stories in newsrooms and appreciates the eccentric characters found there.

--------------

STOP PRESS, ROLE FILM

A few of my favorite films about the news business.

"The Front Page" (1931): Fast, hilarious comedy about competing reporters and one supremely manipulative editor.

"Five Star Final" (1931): Edward G. Robinson plays the editor of a trashy big city tabloid who resurrects a 20-year-old murder case to hype circulation. Melodramatic and dark. Nothing good comes of the story, except sales rise. A message film today's cable news execs should watch.

"Too Hot to Handle" (1938): Clark Cable's an aggressive newsreel photographer covering the Sino-Japanese war. Myrna Loy's the feisty pilot he needs. This action-comedy-romance satirizes the dishonest depths competing news organizations go.

"His Girl Friday" (1940) reworks "Front Page" as a romantic comedy, making it even funnier. Gary Grant's the editor; Roz Russell is his top reporter.

"Deadline -- U.S.A." (1952): Humphrey Bogart's the crusading, hard-boiled editor who hopes one big story can save his newspaper from folding.

"All The President's Men" (1976): Step by step, two Washington Post reporters try to put together the pieces of Richard Nixon's crimes. It captures the process of reporting better than any movie I've seen.

"Network" (1976): A bitter satire that attacks just about everything, but especially the dishonesty and greed of network TV and news. It's exaggerations seemed impossible in 1976 and are sadly plausible today.

"Broadcast News" (1987): Holly Hunter's the savvy TV news producer who tells the pretty-but-dumb anchor (William Hurt) what to say on air through his earpiece. This telling satire of TV news' slide into infotainment still has relevance.

"The Insider" (1999): The true story of how a "60 Minutes" producer got the story featuring an ex-cigarette exec exposing his bosses. They knew cigs were addictive and deadly. CBS higher-ups temporarily killed the segment for business reasons, illustrating journalism's many ethical complications.

"Live from Baghdad" (2002): This HBO movie details what the CNN crew in Iraq went through covering the 1991 Gulf War: How to get the story while staying alive.

"Shattered Glass" (2003): The other side of "All the President's Men." Stephen Glass wrote great articles for the New Republic magazine, so great many weren't true. It's a detective story, as his editor separates Glass' truths from lies.

-- John Greenwald

-- 30 --

Copyright 2009 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.

USA's Number One!

2009-04-24T20:14:00.000-07:00

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AFTER THE SHOW

Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 451, April 26, 2009

===============================

USA'S NUMBER ONE! THE
CABLE CHANNEL, THAT IS

Think of TV as a comfort food and a 'little
blue sky,' and you've got a cable hit

By John Greenwald

Pity the poor peacock. Not the bird but multi-colored symbol of the NBC broadcasting network (which was the first to broadcast in color, back in the 1950s, hence the peacock). With CBS and ABC, NBC used to be one of broadcasting's big three; and now Fox has made it the big four. Sadly, in recent years, NBC is number four, in the cellar.

NBC's management has made a number of poor decisions about shows to replace their once formidable hits. Remember NBC's "must see TV" slogan, for its long run of Thursday evening comedies -- "The Cosby Show," "Cheers," "Seinfeld," "Will & Grace," "Mad About You," "Frasier" and "Friends"? They live on only in re-runs on local independent stations and cable.

Meanwhile, NBC's broadcast competition has programs that zoomed ahead of it. For example: CBS' two big hits, "C.S.I." (about crime forensic scientists), and NCIS (about Navy detectives); Fox's "American Idol"; and ABC's "Desperate Housewives" and "Dancing with the Stars." There's more, but you get the gist.

Some might say NBC's a little desperate.

This year, the network decided to let the expiring "ER" be replaced in the fall not with another drama but with Jay Leno. He'll leave his late-night "Tonight Show" for a comedy-variety show. But this one's in prime time, from 10 to 11 p.m.

Some familiar with the TV business say the Leno move was a distressed one. NBC was trying to hold on to its 10 p.m. ratings by repackaging Leno, thereby risking his appeal. Others thought it brilliant. Even if the ratings of the popular Leno don't equal "ER's," his show will cost far loss to produce than a scripted drama, with its many sets and actors. The new show's ratings may be lower, but its costs will be even lower, making the hour highly profitable to NBC.

It's a gamble for NBC, but the network has little choice but to lift its ratings -- and cash flow.

NBC is part of a much, much larger entity called NBC Universal. It includes the Bravo cable channel; the MSNBC and CNBC cable news channels; Telemundo, the second-largest Spanish-language TV network in the world; Universal Parks & Resorts; Universal Pictures, the movie company; and SciFi, a science fiction cable channel.

(NBC Universal is part of the megaconglomerate GE, which makes everything from little light bulbs to giant steam turbines. Full disclosure: I own GE stock, which has fallen lower than NBC ratings.)

Buried in GE is the USA cable network, and therein lies a tale.

Most cable networks specialize, like niche magazines on a newsstand. You've got your fashion, food and home decorating channels; your action, adventure and comedy channels; your history, military and exploration channels; your old movie channels and your new movie channels; your sex channels and children channels; more sports channels than I can count; and of course the news channels. I'm surprised that cat fanciers and dog lovers haven't created their own cable channels.

In the middle of all this is USA, a sort of a general interest drama channel that's become the biggest hit in the cable industry. For most weeks, it ranks number one. Its shows are seven of Nielsen's cable top 20 for prime time.

USA's slogan "characters welcome," loosely ties together its few original shows, like "Monk," the obsessive-compulsive detective; the new "Royal Pains," about a doctor to the rich and famous; and World Wrestling Entertainment matches (speaking of characters).

But most of USA's "characters welcome" programming is long strips of re-runs of network shows, like "House," "NCIS" and mini-marathons of "Law & Order." The channel also throws in a few comedies, like "Becker" and "Wings," plus paid-programming in the wee hours.

USA makes money from two sources, advertising and cable subscriber fees. In the current ad slump, which is killing ad-dependent broadcast TV, ad-supported cable channels like USA are riding out the storm, often handsomely.

USA and SciFi contributed $1 billion to NBC Universal's bottom line last year, the AP reports. "USA is the single biggest asset that we currently have at this company," Jeff Gaspin, president of NBC Universal's cable entertainment group, told the AP.

Why has USA ratings and profits soared? Bonnie Hammer, the channel's boss, explained it best. "We wanted good, smart escapism, a little blue sky," she told the AP.

Familiar police and medical dramas, where bad guys are caught and diseases almost always cured, are just right for today's audiences. If not actually harmed by the on-going Great Recession, they can feel its impact around them. Who wouldn't want a "little blue sky," like video comfort good, coming into their home?

TV is usually thought of as either a business or an art form. But I think it's also constructive to liken it to someone coming into your home, say a quirky aunt or uncle, who's full of stories, and who tells them well. He has scores and scores of tales about emergency room doctors in Chicago and dogged New York detectives. He keeps you so hooked with each story you can't wait for the next one.

TV's the great visitor, exciting and reassuring at the same time. No wonder USA's doing so well.

-- 30 --