The FCC Chair, , is suggesting that we may have an opportunity to have a free wireless internet. It would be wonderful if the government could do something that benefits citizens and not the corporations for a change — although FREE internet access could certainly drive e-commerce for everyone too.
The WSJ Blog ran this story the other day and reported that the:
FCC chairman suggested that the agency consider setting aside “spectrum for a free or very low cost wireless broadband service.”
On March 2nd it was reported that the director of THE WHITE BALLOON had been imprisoned by the Government of Iran. He is still being detained. I came across this petition and signed it. I am sure that there is more that can be done, but this is a start.
Screen points out:
Panahi, who won the Camera d’Or award at Cannes for his debut feature The White Balloon and took the Golden Lion prize at Venice for The Circle, was a vocal supporter of the opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi in last year’s disputed presidentaial election in Iran.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the plan to deny films (like all the oscar nominated movies this year) that don’t promote “family values” which to some mean gay characters.
Luckily some people are doing something about it. For a start you can sign this petition started by R. Michael McWhorter (thank him by following him on Twitter) :
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/no_florida_film_censorship/
“Earth. It Was Fun While It Lasted.” Armegeddon’s tag line sticks with me, because I instinctively substitute “Earth” for “Indie Film” when I read it.
In these days of RampantFilmBizChange, everything is ripe for reconsideration. MCN hipped me to AdWeek’s collection of “66 Great Movie Taglines“. Sure the list gets a smile regularly from me, but I walk away deadened and jaded. The sell is obvious. The dominant clever factor feels like a child beauty pagents’ related icky. “Look at me! Look at me! Give me a trophy! Now!!!”. Get me outta there.
Can’t we do better? Or at least do different?
FilmmakerMagBlog tipped me to this NY TImes article on “evolution” of editing to mirror the way the brain works or likes to.
The basic shot structure of the movies, the way film segments of different lengths are bundled together from scene to scene, act to act, has evolved over the years to resemble a rough but recognizably wave-like pattern called 1/f, or one over frequency — or the more Hollywood-friendly metaphor, pink noise. Pink noise is a characteristic signal profile seated somewhere between random and rigid, and for utterly mysterious reasons, our world is ablush with it.
Movies today are, on average, much pinker than the films of half a century ago. Their shot structure has greater coherence, a comparatively firmer grouping together of similarly sized units that ends up lending them a frequency distribution ever more in line with the lab results of human reaction and attention times. “Roughly since 1960,” Dr. Cutting said, “filmmakers have been converging on a pattern of shot length that forces the reorientation of attention in the same way we do it naturally.”
Lego and Star Wars are like peanut butter and jelly. Stop motion and YouTube are their bread. There is such a huge supply of great work out there, we are ready to see the best of list of the genre. For now though, we are willing to venture that this is worthy of inclusion on just such a list. Hope The Younger wanted this placed in The Bowl but the violence is a bit intense for the young ‘uns, and we are not ashamed to confess our total love of these things anyway, so it’s landing here today instead.
The opening number felt so inappropriate that I first hoped that the show would keep up a feel of a high school spoof of the Spirit Awards. Shouldn’t such a celebration of art & entertainment aim to contextualize all that is great about this Dream Factory? Okay, if they can’t figure out how to do that, I would be fine with several hours of pure crass classless puns like the song & dance intro promised too, but no. We get 4 hours of dullness instead. The fun of the show becomes critiquing all the mistakes.
