TOTALLY OFF: Who died...

[Paul Mather]

On Thu, Mar 21, 2002 at 03:55:42PM -0500, K Henderson wrote:

=> >Which just goes to show that no matter what one does, someone will
=> >manage to see bad in it.  Hooray for curmudgeons everywhere!
=>                ^^^
=>
=> You misspelled self-aggrandizing.

You appear to know a lot about Bono to be able to discern his personal
motives for doing what he does.  Are you a closet Bono stalker? ;-)

=> >BTW, I didn't realise the Oscars were mandatory viewing.  Is this some
=> >case of "we control the horizontal; we control the vertical" going on
=> >here that I don't know about?
=>
=> Yes.  I guess you didn't watch 60 Minutes this past Sunday, where Story 1
=> was about John Nash and the Beautiful Mind movie (nominated for 2 zillion
=> Oscars) and Story 3 was about Dame Judi Dench, nominated as best actress for
=> a movie that nobody has apparently seen, 'cause it really hasn't even been
=> widely-released yet.  It's ridiculous - you *can't* avoid it, without

I guess your TV has only one channel and no off button.

If I don't want to see Oscar coverage I simply turn it off.  It's a
pretty simple, yet very effective strategy.

=> the ratings boost for their own show....but then of course, with the way
=> corporations are ever-increasingly tied together, it wouldn't surprise me if
=> CBS and the studios that made these two movies both were under one
=> even-larger multi-media enterprise and so the whole network of CBS is used
=> as a marketing tool.  I forget who owns who these days....another day,
=> another merger.

Well, I think you're onto something there.  I remember seeing a really
interesting PBS documentary about "the movie business" and how the
whole machine is increasingly being integrated into one vertical
market in which the same large corporations own the newspapers/
magazines/TV shows that review/shill for the movies the studios make,
(owned by that corporation) which then end up on TV and video,
sold/broadcast via the same corporate outlets (not to mention
merchandised out the wazoo, too).

There was also an interesting explanation as to why action movies and
simplistic plots are becoming ever more popular: the foreign (non-US)
market is now such a significant gross of total revenue for a film
that it becomes an important consideration when making a film.  Action
movies with simple plots are very easy to subtitle and have
non-English speakers follow what's going on, and so "play well"
overseas.  (I guess blowing things up/gunning down bad guys is
considered a kind of universal language.)

The documentary really made me appreciate the steady diet of
independent/limited run films we get at The Lyric here in downtown
Blacksburg!

Cheers,

Paul.

e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
 deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
        --- Frank Vincent Zappa