Category: Movies and Television

I saw some initial trailers for this upcoming film, and thought it looked okay, but wasn’t particularly amazed. However, Harry at AICN has now seen the finished product and is raving about it. He writes,

It is here, where it is time to witness legend unleashed, heroism, sacrifice and the sort of greatness we are blessed to see envisioned from the imagination of the Dark Ages and trumpeted upon the whiz-bangery of 3D High Tech 21st century spectacle.

I have to admit that there is a primal quality to the ancient legends like Beowulf. The reason that Lord of the Rings was such a success was because it sought to tap into that primal source, and creating the depth to replace centuries of lore took JRR Tolkien decades. If the Beowulf movie truly brings the ancient legend – without any Hollywood tropes, but with its integrity intact – to the modern screen, then it really will be a spectacular epic.

Interesting article in Forbes about the WGA strike. Coming from a conservative business publication like Forbes, this kind of rhetoric is surprising:

“When 12,000 Hollywood writers traded pencils for picket signs this week, they took a huge risk. Even riskier: not striking. Losing to the studios now could doom their union as television gives way to the Internet.”

The Wall Street Journal also chimes in, in one of their blogs devoted to digital media, noting that the dispute is more akin to splitting a tip jar at Starbucks rather than a big bag of money:

Writers, quite reasonably, want to be paid more as their work moves online–to the Web, cellphones and anywhere else that gadgets send content in the future.

It’s an especially pointed desire, given that they were essentially shafted in the last digital transformation when DVDs and videocassettes appeared.

As John Aboud, who is a strike captain for WGA, noted in a comment to my post last week on the strike, that even with all the money Hollywood has made, most writers are not well paid (although those at the tippy-top are copiously compensated).

“Median earnings of all members of the Writers Guild is only $5,000,” he wrote.”“How can that be? About 48% of members do not earn any money from writing in a given year. Of those writers who do make some money, one quarter earn less than $37,700 a year.”

That means that being a writer is far, far less lucrative than grad school. This blows my mind.

Somewhat more tongue in cheek, here’s a vision of what TV might look like without the writer’s Guild:

Is it wrong to admit that I’m also a sucker for the word, “Guild” ? I blame the 3 Ds (Dune, Dungeons, and Dragons)

I confess that I don’t know a lot about the TV and movie business. There’s a general “pox on both your houses” vibe going around, but after some casual reading I came across this which basically made me a believer. The writers are asking for 8 cents per DVD, and some cut of the internet distribution profits. That seems reasonable, and even kind if humble once I learned more details about the feudal nature of the industry. From the link,

Last night I went on NBC.com, clicked on “The Office.” You can watch entire episodes of 10, 15 series. OK. You click on the office, what do you get? You get a commercial for Fidelity Investments. Then you watch the cold open, then you get a commercial for Target. They are monetizing these episodes already. OK?

Carlton Cuse was telling me “Lost” does not run a second network rerun. So writers on that show are not getting the typical nice check you usually get when working on a successful series. That goes right to the Internet. They’re making money on it. We’re not making money on those.

We must realize that that’s the kind of issue we cannot let stand. That’s the way my kids watch TV. They hear about a show, they look for it on the Internet. Soon, when computers and your TV are connected, that’s how we’re all going to watch. OK? Those residuals are going to go from what they are toward zero if we don’t make a stand now.

There’s a lot more, and it seems clear to me who to root for. If you want to read more on the issue, here’s some background on the negotiations and evidence that the strike will have ripple effects to advertisers. Lastly, there’s a blog run by WGA members that gives you their perspective.

To be honest, I hope the strike does serious damage to the established order of things. Any system where Firefly gets canceled and “Ugly Betty” gets greenlit is so ridiculously broken that it needs replacing anyhow.

I’m a sucker for quiz sites. There’s a new one called Brainfall that’s loadde with movie and television quizzes. Example:

Which Action Hero Are You?
You are MacGyver. Ingenuity is your game. Don’t leave home without your sundry office supplies: rubber bands, paper clips, and the like. Life and death situations are your forte, but you may be getting too old for it. In today’s eyes you’re an old legend, but your first season mullet will always be remembered.

apparently, I am also Dumbledore (which character in Harry Potter are you?) and a combination of both Belle and Pocahontas (Which Disney Princess are you?).

Obviously the accuracy of any single quiz is always suspect, but I think that certain outcomes are going to be correlated. Thus, if you had a lot of people take a lot of these tests and compared the results in aggregate, you might actually get a pretty good picture of someone’s personality. Part of this might be because movie and television characters are in a sense personality archetypes; they are designed to be somewhat more focused on certain traits (of usefulness/threat to the protoganist or for the sake of the plot). So they make pretty good basis functions for personality. One might even call them, ahem, personality prototypes.