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Women’s Silent Era Success and New Century Supremacy?

8 May

4th article in our series Next Generation of Films for Women

Nominating Katherine Bigalow’s work “The Hurt Locker” (2008), “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012), we will prescribe her as an antidote for contemporary weaknesses in popular filmmaking. This article will also predict what other female filmmakers will once again rise to the occasion and save audiences from the kinds of predictability that are apparent in so many contemporary films. That’s right, women will be Hollywood’s secret weapon, once again stale ideas, myopic visions, and impotent paradigmatic planning will eventually be overturned.  Unlike yesterdays Hollywood, in tomorrow’s Hollywood it will be the male acting stars that will be running for exposure in breathe-taking female helmed productions.  Judging from the ambitiousness of their current work, their future work will likely have the narrative and dramatic experiences current Hollywood films are missing.  But you may be asking what did he mean by “once again?”

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Traditional Animation versus Pixar: A Tale of Competing Priorities

27 Mar

4th article in our 5 week series on Disney!

As much as it would be nice to discuss how wonderful Disney animation has been (for most of its almost 90 year history) one has to recognize how market forces have challenged their animation enterprise.   A creative juggernaut of the highest caliber, Disney is also a business that has to profit to sustain its production.  Gratifying audiences with warm and elegant animation, if not pioneering the finest animation, Disney has taken many advanced animation development techniques to great heights.  We know their 2 dimensional hand-drawn classics from our childhood favorites.  Yet we also appreciate the digital wizardry of their current 3 dimensional works also. Though we appreciate Disney’s association with Pixar we have to wonder whether a conflict of sorts is brewing.  This article will attempt to illustrate the collision (and sometimes hostility) that is sometimes provoked internally by challenging economic forces, contemporary appetites, and competing priorities at the Cineplex’s.

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Resisting Self-Gratification? A 2013 Comic Book Movie Preview

4 Mar

An odd thing about watching some of Hollywood genres where male psychology figure prominently, is you get to witness many of the very worst contemporary male faults. Strangely, attributions like “Does not play well with others,” is almost a call to arms for many of our contemporary brethren.  Self-gratification is defined as the “the act of giving oneself pleasure or of satisfying one’s own desires [1].” But why is this bad, because many adults agree that civil social interaction actually requires a degree of willful collaboration, sympathetic sharing, and mutual respect and possibly some selflessness?  So the question has to be asked what can be done about this trend?  First I would say stop the Hollywood promotion of these anti-social attributes and stop it while things are still (relatively) manageable.  Raging self-absorbed testosterone of the past, (sometime defined as narcissism) led to some of our worst historical incidents.  No, this trend in entertainment isn’t new but it’s a sad turn of affairs just the same.  As in the past, what can start as conventional dramatic presentation can become a kind of social etiquette for the easily influenced.

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Aurora and Sandyhook Killings; Our Denial and Apathy on Parade

27 Feb

Final Article in our series on Gun Violence in The Media

Our lives get so hectic, we forget to recognize that someone who is next to us. We are somewhat aware of whom they are yet we understand they might or might not share our schedule. Who are they? They may or may not frequent the places we go. Do we know them?  They may or may not be on a first name basis with these people. Regardless of familiarity do we really identify with them at all? Regardless of how acquainted we are, what is our response to them just the same? Do we consistently neglect to acknowledge them? Or can we claim to know them? This article is dedicated to those very people who make up some aspect of our physical environment whom we have yet to become familiar with.  Whether we acknowledge they are our neighbors or not we have to (at some level) admit we share something with them.  Until we get to know them better this paragraph will encourage us to make our eventual introduction to them so much warmer.

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What Does It Mean when Celebrities are Knighted?

9 Jan

5th article in our series “Royal Family’s Influence on Pop Culture”

That celebrities and other public figures occasionally get knighted is one of the things we periodically hear about within England.  It may appear unusual to us because the practice is such a traditional vestige of the country’s strictly monarchal past.  Because we imagined many US citizens and possibly other nationalities don’t know what that term actually means, we thought we should focus on the practice.  Also given the site’s entertainment mission we thought the practice wasn’t that usual it is an honor that many entertainers have received.  In this article we will attempt to demystify what this event actually entails, means, and how it came to be.

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