“Why don’t the movies have plausible, real-world villains anymore? One reason is that a plethora of stereotype-sensitive advocacy groups, representing everyone from hyphenated ethnic minorities and the physically handicapped to Army and CIA veterans, now maintain liaisons in Hollywood to protect their images. The studios themselves often have “outreach programs” in which executives review scripts and characters with representatives from these groups, evaluate their complaints, and attempt to avoid potential brouhahas.”
Tag: 12.05.05
BBC Evacuation Puts Radio Off Air
BBC’s Radio 2,3 and 4 went off the air for a while Monday afternoon. “The break in transmission was caused by a staff evacuation at BBC Broadcasting House in London which led to the networks being taken off the air.”
Tax Credit For UK Filmmakers
The British government proposes instituting a tax credit for producers making films in the UK, with 16% relief for large budget films and 20% for small budgets.
What’s The Right Price For Digital Music?
“Piracy is clearly here to stay, but as iTunes has shown, the record companies’ best strategy is to provide an easy-to-use service that offers music downloads at a fair price. But what price is “fair”? Apple says it is 99 cents a song. Of this, Apple gets a sliver—4 cents—while the music publishers snag 8 cents and the record companies pocket most of the rest. Even though record companies earn more per track from downloads than CD sales, industry execs have been pushing for more.”
Wikipedia Makes New Rules For Contributors
Plagued by complaints of misinformation, Wikipedia will “now require users to register before they can create articles. The website hopes that the registration requirement will limit the number of stories being created. ‘What we’re hopeful to see is that by slowing that down to 1,500 a day from several thousand, the people who are monitoring this will have more ability to improve the quality. In many cases the types of things we see going on are impulse vandalism’.”
The Teen Pulp Connection
“Teen pulp, which evolved out of children’s books and rebelled against their supposed strictures, appears to take up far more real estate on the shelves of bookstores than books of more subtle literary bent for the pre-adult set. The genre also reflects a different set of expectations about how books are read and why.”
Brubeck At 85
He’s still performing 80 concerts a year. “While Tatum, Louis Armstrong and others were inventing jazz, Brubeck was hoping to learn it. Now, some 70 years later, he’s the most successful popularizer in postwar jazz history.”
Are Lit Teaching Standards Failing Students?
Nine years ago Britain institutes a national literacy framework for teaching English. “But the framework has now become a double-edged sword – it provides schools with a common programme to ensure that children have a broad diet of fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry. It has helped us think about the way in which words, sentences and texts weave together. However, for many teachers the framework has become a strait-jacket that limits children’s progress. It has trapped us into ‘delivery’ mode with teachers trotting through objectives without thinking about whether these are relevant to children’s needs.”
Harper’s Without Lapham
“These days, a decade is a long time to be editor of one magazine, and Lewis Lapham has been editor-in-chief at Harper’s for 28 of the last 30 years. But now he is handing the job to his deputy, a man whose byline—Roger Hodge—I once assumed to be a twee Canterbury Tales pseudonym. It turns out Hodge is not only real but intelligent and thoughtful. He grew up on his family’s ranch in Texas and started at Harper’s as an intern at 29, in 1996.”
“Purple” Overamplified, Overheated, And Overhyped
John Lahr writes that “The Color Purple” fails on a number of levels. “Marsha Norman’s libretto is a kind of color-me-purple comic-book outline: it gives us the externals of the plot but not, in any meaningful sense, the internal life of the characters, who function more as anecdotes than as dramatic influences on Celie. As a result, what is earned sentiment in the novel becomes mere sentimentality in the musical. Everything is as literal as a street sign, and sometimes not as interesting.”