Day: April 26, 2019

Trump says U.S. paid no money to North Korea over Warmbier

UncleScoopy

Donald Trump said the United States did not pay any money to North Korea as it sought the release of Otto Warmbier, a day after WaPo reported that Trump had approved a $2 million bill from Pyongyang for the American student’s care.

There is no conflict. The WaPo story claimed that Trump promised North Korea that he would pay. Trump said today he did not pay. If you followed Trump’s business career, you probably believe both.

Trump: Russia investigations an attempted ‘coup’

UncleScoopy

President Donald Trump on Thursday called the FBI probe into his 2016 campaign and subsequent investigations into Russian election meddling “an attempted overthrow” of his administration.

As always with Trump, you don’t know whether he really is that dumb, or is just playing to his base, or both. If there is an attempted overthrow of Trump, only one man could ultimately be behind it. Stop and think about it. If Trump were removed from office, everything would still be the same for the Democrats, for the Republicans in Congress, for the cabinet. Only one person has anything to gain from Trump’s removal – that, wily ultimate mastermind …

Cut! Is this the death of sex in cinema?

UncleScoopy

“The number of films classified 18 for sex has plummeted. We explore how studio pressure, #MeToo nerves and the proliferation of porn created a new puritanism.”

“Perhaps we’re merely seeing a compartmentalising of sexually explicit material versus everyday film … perhaps in the foreseeable future, mainstream cinema will have no need for sex scenes at all.”

This article is written from a British perspective. From this side of the Atlantic, I see it this way: Movies have gone almost totally after mass audiences. The erotic has moved to TV. When we started doing our annual “Top Nude Scene” polls, the winners were almost all from films. Over the course of twenty years, the balance has shifted, gradually but steadily, through evolution rather than revolution, until almost all of the winners are from TV shows.

Nudity is what I know, and I can support the paragraph above with facts, but I believe that many other characteristics of cinema have moved over to TV as well, experimentation and art being paramount among them. A side effect of the latest trend in cinema, the widening gap between art and business, is that the Oscar broadcast has lost popularity steadily, because the winners – the “best” films – are so often films that few have seen, while the audience’s favorite movies are nowhere in sight. It’s just not like that on TV. The award-winning shows – theoretically the best shows – are also highly popular shows.

You can see the current state of cinema as well as I can: There are popular movies and there are Oscar winners, and their paths seldom cross. The seats are filled by spectacle, not thoughtful drama. The studios see that and market accordingly. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that Disney keeps acquiring a bigger share of the industry. They are a studio driven by products with mass audience appeal. This is not a rap on them. They are great at what they do, and they are a public corporation, so they should be placing their money into projects that provide a maximum return on their investment. If I were still in the consulting business, I would tell them to stay the course.

It’s not just the Disney profit motive that drives the current trend. All the studios have learned how to pair their products with the proper delivery system. Spectacles are the films best suited for a theater. You can even argue that they need the theater, because they are the types of films where the big screen adds to the experience. Let’s face it, Death of a Salesman is just as good on a TV screen, or maybe even a cell phone screen, as it would be in a high-tech theater, but you need the big screen to get the best experience out of Star Wars or The Avengers.

So it’s all good. I suppose everything is as it should be, or at least moving in that direction.

But I, and a lot of people like me, have abandoned the theaters because I’m not interested in comic book stories, space adventures, cartoons, gimmicky remakes and the occasional PG-rated rom-com. It’s not that I have BETTER taste. I don’t. I’m not looking for MacFuckingBeth. I love crap. It’s just that I love OTHER crap, like raunchy comedies and biopics, and those things play out just fine on my computer screen.