|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
rate this, joe! Well, well, well. It ought to be interesting to see what happens with this. Briefly, Senator Joe Lieberman (D - Conn.) is proposing that studios be directly penalized for advertising R and NC-17 rated films to teenagers. The studios, needless to say, are not happy. The article predicts the most likely result of such a law is that studios will stop submitting films for ratings at all. At the upper end of the scale--the R/NC-17 area--Lieberman's bill would not produce an entirely bad result for the viewer. If films are no longer rated, then there would no longer be a direct commercial penalty for showing R and NC-17 rated films; exhibitors would no longer be able to say that they couldn't show a film because it was rated too strongly, since no films would be rated. The NC-17 rating, and its accompanying commercial penalty, is enforced disproportionately against films that have sexual content, and would allow studios and exhibitors to stop privileging violence over sex to get the coveted R-rated films into the theaters. (Although, to be sure, given the American market, films would still probably be fairly violent. Sex sells, but gore is easier to get away with.) At the lower end of the scale -- the G and some PG films area -- the lack of a ratings system wouldn't really matter. Decent family-oriented fare will still sell; it's not as if Disney would suddenly take the liberty to start throwing out NC-17 rated animation. (Though it would be interesting to see what they could produce if they did.) Studios know how to market those films so that people know what they are. Where this type of plan would create problems would be somewhere in the middle, some PG/ most PG-13/all R-rated films. Most people would agree that there's are sometimes noticeable differences between films with those ratings, even if most people aren't entirely sure what those differences are. (Neither is the ratings board, so at least everyone's on the same page.) Very generally, PG-13 is allowed to have considerably more violence than PG -- it was created partly as a result of the backlash against the violence in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom -- and a spash more nudity (generally rearward only, although the occasional flash of breastworks may be allowed) and references to sexual content (although not actual sexual content -- or rather, actual simulated sexual content) than PG, as well as stronger language. R is allowed considerably more leeway in terms of harsher language, violence and sexual content and nudity than either of the PG ratings; on the other hand, the division between what makes a film R or NC-17 is so thoroughly muddy that nobody can tell. (Very generally, any view of a naked penis will get an automatic R; more than one view, and you're flirting with NC-17. Excessive amounts of frontal female nudity will trigger an NC-17, but the ratings board's tolerance for frontal female nudity is very high indeed; you practically have to shoot straight into the vagina to get an NC-17 for female nudity. Very very VERY extreme violence gets an NC-17 as well, but the violence has to be WAY out there. That's a very muddy guideline, however; Clerks received an initial NC-17 for nothing more than strong language.) What's going to happen, if more and more filmmakers and studios decline to submit their films for ratings to avoid legal liability, is that people will have to rely purely on reviews and word-of-mouth to determine if those films are appropriate for themselves or their older children. Not entirely a bad development, but even I, no fan of the ratings system, will concede that a more rigid demarcation of types of films makes evaluating them easier. The only way in which Lieberman's bill can possibly have teeth, so to speak, is to require all films produced for exhibition in this country to be submitted to the MPAA or to have the same civil penalties attached. Once you do that, however, you're involved in state sponsored censorship; even this hideously conservative Supreme Court is likely to be perturbed somewhat by that development. Moreover, the MPAA is, by definition, a private agency or association; the studios might bridle at being forced by law to submit their films to them -- independent studios certainly will. Since the MPAA exists only at the will of the major studios, it's entirely possible that to get around that sort of enforcment clause, they would simply dissolve the MPAA as an organization. (And there would be great rejoicing...) Should this law actually get enacted -- assuming it's not just political posturing, of which Lieberman seems to be doing a lot lately -- it will almost certainly be challenged. In some ways, it's a pity if it doesn't happen, though. It would be nice to see the distinction between R and NC-17 eliminated, as it's almost entirely sophistry in any event; the difference betwen the ratings is the MPAA's mood on a particular day. (Mind, if I had to sit through almost every major studio film produced, I'd be hard on the ratings, as well. Freddy Got Fingered would get an NC-17 just because Tom Green was in it. But I digress.) Theatre owners should not be required to assume that sort of censorial and parental responsibility for teenagers; if they're there and purchasing the ticket, theatre owners should be allowed to assume that parents have given permission. If it means that 14-year-old Johnny sneaks out and gets in to see, for example, The Center of the World (Flash required) when he knows perfectly well that he shouldn't ... well, he does know that, doesn't he? At some point, it stops being the theater owner's fault for letting the kid in, and starts being the kid's fault for doing something he knows perfectly well he shouldn't do. @ 02:43 PM CST [Link]
social darwinism, caused by a television near you! Parents strongly cautioned. Don't read this. It'll just piss you off.
It must be evolution at work. Humanity has somehow evolved ahead of nature's schedule, and Nature has been forced to find very fast ways to weed the herd. Therefore, certain people will be allowed to stand before the herd, and, taking all precautions to ensure that they don't get badly hurt, they will then demonstrate suicidal behavior. People of insufficient brain power to be encouraged to reproduce will then emulate said behavior. If evolution is successful, they will become extinct. If evolution fails, then they will at least hopefully have learned a lesson that will be encoded into the genes and passed on down to the next generation. Well, let's face it: can there be any other reason for MTV's Jackass to exist? Unless you're in a particularly brain-dead/damaged state in the first place, it's not very entertaining. Unless you're the type who likes to watch people thwarting evolution in the first place. Johnny Knoxville and friends ought to be extinct themselves. It's only their extensive safety precautions which betray the fact that, yes, evolution has had its way with at least some portion of their higher brain centers. Not, unfortunately, the part that says, "Hey, dipshit, setting yourself on fire isn't really the brightest thing you can do. There's no future in it. You can only set yourself on fire so many times before people stop caring. Your ability to find a future career in which self-immolation plays a large part may be somewhat limited." However, the fact remains that they have, somehow, made suicidal behavior into gainful employment. The fact also remains that there are many many people out there whose brains have been sadly neglected by the evolutionary process. Who somehow are entirely incapable of understanding the concept that perhaps if they're not on a television show with producers who have a large fiscal investment in NOT letting their talent be killed by this idiocy, they might be killed by this idiocy. (And, really, how hard is it to understand that you might not be best served by imitating the behavior of people on a show called JACKASS, for heaven's sake?) I mean, for cryin' out loud. How old do you have to be to understand that perhaps letting yourself get hit by a car is not exactly the brightest thing to do? That perhaps there might be an unintended result, such as broken limbs, brain damage, or, perhaps, a sudden case of death? How old should you be before you realize that just maybe standing in the street waving a chainsaw at passing traffic might get people a tad perturbed? (We'll ignore the whole "wearing a hospital gown, jumping into traffic, waving it at children" part, shall we? Let's shall.) How old do you have to be to understand that, just maybe, setting yourself on fire is not the most brain-powered thing to do? I'm pretty sure that by the time I was eleven, I understood the concept: Toasty Person, BAD and PAINFUL. Just Say No To Toasty Person. I know there are parents out there who feel that Jackass is inciting teens to do stupid things. As if teens need more incitement at a particularly stupid phase of their lives. Do I think teens should be allowed to watch it? Well ... put it this way. I don't think the show should be on the air. This isn't because I think it incites people to acts of stupidity; I rather suspect most of them would have managed some sort of stupidity on their own -- it comes with that age. But I don't think that's why it shouldn't be on the air, and I wouldn't be particularly in favor of MTV pulling it off due to pressure. I think it shouldn't be on the air because it's a bad show; I don't think it's the sort of television that anyone needs to watch. As for parents allowing kids to watch it ... well, at some point, parents have to trust that they've done their job well, don't they? That their kid is mature enough to understand that it's just television. At some point, parents need to let the kid loose, preferably gradually and ideally nonfatally. If the kid can watch it and still can't see the difference between all the precautions they take for the dangerous stunts, and just pouring oil on yourself and torching it, then there must be something else at work. (And we'll ignore the fact that the chainsaw guy was nineteen and really should have known better, shall we? Let's shall.) There are also those people out there who will say, "Well, it's all the parents' fault! They let their kids watch this crap!" But frankly, I don't believe that, either. No, of course kids shouldn't be watching that stuff. But by the same token, ten, twelve, fourteen year olds should be able to exercise some judgement. By the time kids are ten, eleven years old, their parents have told them, over and over, "Don't play with fire! it's hot!" The parents have discovered that, yes, maybe the kids do need to touch a small fire -- matches or candles or something that lets them know that, yes, fire is indeed hot. Most kids have seen animals hit by cars or heard about people who were hit. By that age, most kids know that playing with fire or playing in traffic is just asking for it. A television show should not be able to undo all the work that the parents have done by that time. (We're still ignoring the nineteen year old, who should be well past the age of THAT sort of impressionable idiocy.) Hey, if you've got a better explanation than Evolution doing its best to catch up, let me know. @ 05:25 PM CST [Link]
gamesmanship
Well, they got me. They finally got me. When the game show craze came back to television, I took a look at them. I watched at least one episode of each of them. Twenty-One, Greed, the various other imitators and the ubiquitous Who wants to be a millionaire. All but Millionaire have, of course, long since bit the dust. Every great great once in a while, I may catch part of Millionaire, but it's not the sort of thing I'll make any time to watch. The format isn't quite interesting enough, and Regis grates. When the reality shows hit, again, I took a look. I saw an episode of Survivor, CBS' Big Brother, MTV's Fear (think Survivor as channeled by Blair Witch), bits and pieces of Boot Camp, MTV's Real World and Road Rules and most of the rest (Temptation Island was that one step WAY too far for me). And, interestingly, most of them are still around; it's much easier to keep a show on the air if the season is, in fact, brief, after all. But none of them caught my attention for very long. The concept of putting people in extraordinarily artificial situations, forcing them to both cooperate and then betray each other ... it just didn't work for me. And then along comes NBC's Weakest Link. Viewed objectively, the questions aren't really much more difficult than those on Millionaire; in fact, with a slight focus on pop culture, they may overall be easier. They seem to be harder, however, because the round is timed and because they're not multiple choice; you don't get to sit there and consider and hem and haw, because on Weakest Link, time is literally money. There are two aspects that make the show work. First, they have managed to distill the essence of the cooperate/compete ethic of Survivor down to a one hour show. I'd wondered how they would prevent the strongest contestants from being voted off immediately; the answer is that the game is structured so that you need the strongest people at the beginning to answer questions accurately and keep the money rolling in. Near the end, the only ones left are the strongest, and the cream, more or less, rises to the top. The two left standing then get to slug it out first in a standard round like the ones they've just been through, followed by a one on one untimed round where they answer five questions each; the oen with the most correct answers wins.  The second aspect that makes the show work is the host, of course. Anne Robinson is a host like none seen before on American television. Most game show hosts are kind, genial ... pretty much interchangeable, really. Ms Robinson's game face is rather startlingly nasty by comparison; she insults the contestants and the structure of the game encourages them to insult each other as they evaluate their strengths and weaknesses for the audience. To be sure, the nastiness is no less staged than anything you might see on the various "reality" shows; it's highly unlikely that most of the people they get for these shows would really be that despicable to total strangers as a matter of course. The lines are almost certainly fed to them, at least as a setup. Frankly, based purely on the one show I've seen, I rather agree with her own assessment that she thinks she seems mostly impatient, rather than nasty. Then again, she has been condemned by the Welsh parliament. It will be interesting to see if she makes such missteps here, and if NBC decides to leave them in the show--they have already replayed one round due to some sort of production error, according to the end credits. Can you imagine what that must have been like? Ms Robinson declares, "You are the weakest link. Goodbye!" And then the producer says, "Wait, no ... there's something wrong. We've got to do that round over. We need a new set of questions." The entire outcome changed. In short, Weakest Link is a show that appeals to the game show snob in me while also appealing to my extremely low sense of humor. The Survivor aspect of the game is going to be highlighted during May sweeps (of course) when the first season Survivor cast takes part; Richard Hatch is reportedly the first one off. The potential for celebrity shows a la Millionaire will be great, of course; imagine Ms Robinson versus the cast of Friends or Frasier, for example. (Shooting fish in a barrel, really.) However, there is one problem. Her tagline, "You are the weakest link. Goodbye!" is repeated at least seven times per show, one for each contestant dismissal; additionally, some variation of it is used to go into and come back from commercial. She says it exactly the same way each time a contestant is dismissed, and the variations for commercials are strikingly similar. Already, it's working my last nerve. I predict that I (and a significant chunk of the rest of the country) will be thoroughly and completely tired of hearing the damn thing no later than the end of the April 17 show. (I don't know why it's so much more irritating than Regis' "Let's find the next person who wants to be a millionaire", unless it's just that it's repeated so much more often and her on-screen personality is designed to be so much more irritating. Which is an impressive feat, all in itself, really.) 
For the record, the most difficult game show on television is not Weakest Link, nor Millionaire, nor even Jeopardy; it's the History Channel's HistoryIQ. I'm a political history major, and frankly, two episodes of that show left me feeling like I didn't know anything. The host is relatively innocuous, and, unliike Weakest Link or Millionaire or many other game shows, the host isn't really part of the point. The focus actually is on the game and the contestants. They've actually got an online version of the game up at their site. Go. Play. Be humbled. But you wuz warned. @ 09:53 PM CST [Link]
whose X?
Tribune Entertainment's upcoming syndicated show "Mutant X," has become embroiled in a legal battle with the studio 20th Century Fox, who wants to stop production on the series [...] Fox is claiming that the anticipated show is a look-alike of its box office hit "X-Men." "Mutant X," a co-production of Tribune, Marvel Comics and Fireworks Entertainment, chronicles the adventures of a group of human mutants who are bound together by extraordinary genetically engineered powers. [...] The new TV series is based on the "X-Men" series conceived in 1963. Marvel later sold film rights to the X-Men characters to Fox. So ... basically Fox would be right, then, wouldn't they? Same characters, more or less, right? Or is there a difference somewhere that's invisible to the naked eye? How can you legally claim that you're not basing something on those characters when you really must be? (And what was Marvel thinking to sell rights that way?) And if Studios USA is bailing on the hour-long action drama (cancelling Xena and Hercules in back to back years, bailing on both the half-hour versions of Jack of All Trades and Cleopatra 2525 and then pulling the plug on an expanded Cleopatra) because the market for it is vanishing, what on earth does Tribune Entertainment (Flash degraded ... I mean, enhanced site) think it's doing by expanding its commitment in that area? That adds another, presumably fairly expensive (can't do X-Men without special effects) series to a line-up that includes Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda (strangely enough, the highest rated original syndicated drama on television, despite alternating painfully dull scripts with simply painful scripts with some actually fairly interesting stories--it's fighting for the syndicated drama lead with Studios USA's Xena and MGM's Stargate SG-1), Earth Final Conflict (so heavily serial that it can't gain viewers as it chugs into its likely-to-be strike-delayed planned-to-be final season next year) and BeastMaster--for some reason, Tribune has, outside of SciFi, the strongest presence in science fiction/fantasy series of any of the netlets, networks, or cable outlets. (It's worth noting that Studios USA is having a perfectly miserable season for its hour dramas, no matter where they air. Studios USA lists six hour-long dramas on its website: Hercules departed last season, Cleopatra 2525 and Xena depart this year, The District is having a tough time of it, and First Years was cancelled after three episodes. Only the Law and Order franchise (which gains another show next season, assuming the upcoming strikes don't eat it) is doing unarguably well. Even their one half-hour sitcom, Welcome To New York, has sailed into the sunset.) On the other hand, Tribune owns so many stations that they can do what USA can't, and dictate to major market stations that they WILL show it, and they WILL put it into a decent time slot. Studios USA, meanwhile, was left to watch Xena and Cleopatra 2525 get orphaned into early morning time slots in many markets because they had no such leverage. Oddly, Studios USA never tried to send Cleopatra 2525 to SciFi, which would have made sense, given SciFi's largely male audience--you got beautiful, intelligent and improbably scantily-clad women kicking a rather astonishing amount of ass on a weekly basis, with plots that were generally fairly interesting .... sounds like a match made in heaven, really. It shouldn't even have been a hard sell; Studios USA owns SciFi. For that matter, they could have shifted it to the flagship USA Network, which is taking a pounding now that it's lost wrestling, yielding first place in the cable ratings to (I believe) Nickelodeon. Strange are the ways of the television biz. @ 04:31 PM CST [Link]
remake
OK, what is in the water this week? First, Christina Aguilera, Pink, Mya, and Lil' Kim (with her lil kims just a-bustin' out all over) remake "Lady Marmalade" and then Geri Halliwell remakes "It's Raining Men" for Bridget Jones' Diary, with a video--directed by two different men--that apparently channels both "Fame" and the Airotica Airlines sequence from "All That Jazz". (An interesting side note: Geri's .com domain has apparently been hijacked by someone called "Sam the Record Man", and her .co.uk domain was apparently supposed to be up last year but hasn't made it yet.) I'm not saying that songs shouldn't be remade. It's just ... somehow, songs that you hear when you're young, and which manage to survive quite some time without being remade acquire a certain sort of feeling in your mind. It just somehow feels wrong for that song to be remade--and if anyone was going to redo it, it should have been LaBelle herself. As an example, this remake of "It's Raining Men" (NOT Geri's and RealPlayer required) works as a song--to the extent that it does work--in part because Martha Wash still carries the vocal load, despite the ever-glamorous presence that is RuPaul. It sounds right, even though it sounds different. (The video, on the other hand .... just watch that part where it starts literally raining men. I'm sorry, but I do NOT want to take a man into my mouth quite that way. Ever. I mean, yes, we have been called cannibals, but nobody meant it literally, for heaven's sake!) On the other hand ... there is a certain panache to the attitudes of Christina et al in doing that particular video. Never has being a 'ho looked so kicky and glamorous and fun! (And, after all, the fact that it glamorized prostitution was one of the knocks against the song back in its day in the first place.) And the video has an entirely different reason for existing, anyway. (A "reinvention of the musical form." Based "loosely" on the Offenbach opera Orpheus in the Underworld. Yes. Well.) And it finally gives Christina an excuse for the hair. It's not just records that are subject to this peculiar remake craze, of course. It extends to the current ongoing rage for redoing tv projects as film and dredging up blasts from the past that should have stayed past. And some rather odd choices, at that. Josie and the Pussycats? They only made something like 36 total episodes of both the main series and its sequel Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space. What on earth is the audience for this film? The boomers who are too old to really want to go see it? The kids who are too young to remember it? The Cartoon Network only put the cartoon itself back into rotation shortly before the film's release date was set. Nobody remembers this 'toon except the executives who greenlighted the project. Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles. Ten years after the last (not that successful) film. Why? What has Paul Hogan done lately besides Subaru commercials? Rat Race. A remake of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Cast of thousands. OK. whatever. Planet of the Apes I am somewhat curious about ... although that doesn't quite mean that remaking it is a particularly sensible decision. However, with improvements in technology and makeup and whatnot, it should look quite a bit less cheesy than the original (although that's part of its charm, to be sure; that and Moses' the Gun Lord--aka Charlton Heston--overacting, of course) If nothine else, the photo on that page looks as if the actors have quite a lot more expressiveness than they did in the original. I can't even begin to imagine how far out they'll have to push the violence Rollerball to make it work; it was extraordinarily violent for its day. And in this day of Congress and various groups up in arms about violence in movies marked to youth (and who else is going to see a film about rollerskating murder as sport?), it's certainly a peculiar enough choice. Ocean's Eleven is certainly an... odd choice, as well. The thing about this whole sequence of remakes upcoming is that it's the sort of thing that you can see appealing to executives my age and slighly older. Things they saw, remember, enjoyed, that haven't been around for a while, and they think, "Well, why not?" And, after all, they could hit that moment again, wind up with something like The Brady Bunch Movie or The Addams Family. Of course, those things had been in front of both old and young audiences on television for decades and more audiences were familiar with them. It will be interesting to see if these film remakes fare as well. As for the music ... I know it's purely selfish of me, but I do secretly hope that both of those songs will flop. Partly because both of those actual songs, as performed by the remakers, are fairly awful. And partly ... just because. (4/16/2001: Well, I suppose I have to accede to the remade "Lady Marmalade"; no less than LaBelle herself watched the video on today's Access Hollywood and liked it and the song, although she seemed to like the video more. If nothing else, though, it was worth it to see the startled look on her face and see her say, "Oh, they're really whores, aren't they?" I mean, she didn't mean it THAT way, but it was one of those "Wait ... what did she say?" moments.) @ 01:05 AM CST [Link] |
|
|||
|
|
||||
