Archive for the 'Film, TV, Video etc' Category
Well, we haven’t condemned at all in 2010, so it must be long past time to condemn again. Here’s a 42nd open condemnation thread. What’s been worthy of condemnation this year so far? Which evil political, cultural, social, musical, religious, and other phenomena need condemnation? (Or loud denunciation?)
You can condemn anything you like except French po/mo vampire movies and their soundtracks.
On Q&A tonight, the defence from John Roskam of Tony Abbott’s remarks on homelessness and the government’s social housing strategy at the Catholic Social Service Association’s national conference appeared to be that it wasn’t clear what he’d said. [It's worth noting that Roskam did agree that homelessness being halved was a worthwhile goal.]
That assumption seemed to be shared by the panel. It surprised me, because Christopher Pearson reproduced a transcript of Abbott’s remarks in his column in The Australian on Sunday.
The part about “the poor will always be with us” is indicated, rather than quoted, perhaps because (as often occurs) it was a question from the floor and the recording wasn’t clear. Sometimes when a session is transcribed, the speaker’s comments are also omitted if a question can’t be accurately redacted. But the substance of Abbott’s remarks, mostly verbatim, is in fact on the public record.
The first Q&A for the year features Kevin Rudd and an audience of yoof in Old Parliament House (no doubt screened according to approved Abetz principles to include quotas of Young Libs, LaRoucheites, etc).
I won’t be liveblogging it, because of the delay caused by the lack of daylight saving in Queensland. But here’s an open thread should you wish to comment.
No doubt there will also be a lively discussion on Twitter at #qanda. [And just a reminder that LP is on Twitter, and the new new Facebook, for that matter. If you are too, we'd love you to join us elsewhere in the social media-verse!]
It’s the beginning of a new year, and Tony Abbott and his team are busy preparing to take over the world.
It’s time for an LP competition. Explain in haiku, limerick, sonnet or cinquain what’s going on in the LOOP* office. Winners get two free passes to “In The Loop”.
The rules are flexible, but making me LOL is a high priority. I’ll announce the winners next weekend. Movie opens 21 January and tickets can be used across most of Australia.
*LOOP = Leader of the Opposition Party.
Well, we haven’t condemned for ages, so it must be long past time again to condemn. Here’s a 41st open condemnation thread. What’s been worthy of condemnation in 2009? Which evil political, cultural, social, musical, religious, and other phenomena need condemnation? (Or loud denunciation?)
You can condemn anything you like except Sarah Blasko.
“The most famous Austrian since Hitler”
When Brüno was released in Australian cinemas it was received less than enthusiastically by a member of the Melbourne queer press.
The columnist wasn’t pleased with Sacha Baron Cohen’s turn as an Austrian gay fashionista who leaves the “superficial” world of Euro-fashion to become a superstar in LA.
The critic suggested that although Brüno was made with a satirical purpose it wasn’t acceptable for Cohen to create such a caricature of a gay male.
In a quick and dirty post announcing the presence of LP on Twitter I wrote about where I thought mass adoption of the platform was likely to take place.
My favourite use for Twitter? Search for breaking news and to capture the zeitgeist and as a back channel for important events. It’s made watching popular TV fun. Which by the way is where I think it’s real potential lies – integrated with TV as a live mass media watercooler. For example, watching tonight’s Four Corners on the Liberal Party’s internal struggle with global warming and the CPRS while following the #4corners tag.
More comprehensively in The Naked Truth About Social v Broadcast Media, Jason Wilson writes about exactly that intersection of social and broadcast media.
The post stems from a recent event where Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes obliged his legion of fans on Twitter by uttering a single word.
Tonight’s Four Corners has a piece on the Coalition’s views on climate change. The blurb makes clear that much of the party rank and file are denialists. That’s not news.
However, they’re also promising some kind of meta-analysis of public polling on climate change, that purportedly makes clear “…that concern amongst voters about climate change has “softened” over the past eighteen months.”
I’ll be interested to see what the poll bloggers make of it…
King of California tries hard to be the kind of quirky movie cinemagoers will mention when discussing their favourite quirky movies (see Juno and Little Miss Sunshine).
Continue reading ‘Madness in the family: King of California and Stitches’
While the format of Electric Dreams is now thoroughly familiar – a modern-day family is placed in a facsimile of some past historical era, and their reactions to it recorded for the camera, this BBC reality show (screening early on Sunday evenings on Channel Ten for the next two weeks) is somewhat unusual in its choice of historical eras to recreate. Rather than settler households, or the travails of Victorian-era aristocracy, this show recreates the recent past and concentrates on the progression of domestic technology. Each episode concentrates on a decade, with the first episode (screening last night) setting the participating family up in a “1970s house”. Each day, the “clock” was advanced one year, and new gadgets were delivered to the house, roughly corresponding to the median British household of the year.
At one level, this show, both for the (adult) participants and for much of the audience, is an exercise in geeky nostalgia, with the theme tune from Pot Black, Pong, and a beautifully-restored but still awful to drive Ford Cortina making appearances. But, to give the producers credit, they’ve very much tried to place the technology in its social context as much as possible. There’s a power outage, caused by “a miners’ strike”. Contrary to popular belief, the children actually spend less time interacting with their parents in the “1970s”, particularly as their mother battles the lack of kitchen facilities. And it rapidly becomes clear just how limited home entertainment options were in this relatively recent era – particularly in a drab English winter.
But, entertaining as the show was – and as a child of the 1980s I can’t wait to see the next episode – the format has inherent limitations. The impacts of domestic technology – the gadgets and gizmos we personally interact with – are very real. But invisible technology makes a great deal of difference too; not least of which because it made us materially better-off over that period (in Britain and Australia, if not the United States). The effect of incomes can’t really be dealt with particularly well here – by the end of the show’s timeline, the middle-class family depicted would have reduced their cooking efforts even more; not through any particular piece of technology, but because they could afford to eat out a lot more often.
But it is what it is, and, amongst other questions, it will be interesting to see if the participants identify any particular technology as having the most impact over the eras depicted on the show. The mobile phone, perhaps?
If Mad Max 2 was the Sistine Chapel of Punk as J.G. Ballard once quipped, then perhaps the Last Judgement is at hand! George Miller is going to commence pre-production of Mad Max 4 immediately in NSW. I’m guessing he’s taking a punt on the state most likely to provide, erm, free extras; what with rivers running dry and planning incompetence running rife. Add a liquid fuel disruption and we’ll see who has the last laugh…
A terrific video tribute to the first Maxes set to Motorhead’s Ace of Spades is below the jump. Parental supervision recommended for those easily offended by car accidents
(via Simon Sellars) Continue reading ‘Mad Max 4 to Rescue NSW Government or vice versa’
Well, we haven’t condemned for ages, so it must be long past time again to condemn. Here’s a 40th open condemnation thread. What’s getting up your goat? Which evil political, cultural, social, musical, religious, and other phenomena need condemnation? (Or loud denunciation?)
You can condemn anything you like except the soundtrack to The Hunger.
A lot of the most reliable data on web use and social media comes from the World Internet Project. Most of the findings from the project derive from rigorous quantitative research, and unlike a lot of what purports to be analysis of the web and social media is therefore free of commercial or ideological and boosterish agendas.
WIP’s founder, Professor Jeffrey Cole, is currently in Australia.
Margaret Simons observed in today’s Crikey email that he’d given a briefing to a Fairfax strategy meeting on Monday:
So when Cole speaks, media executives tend to listen, even if they don’t like what they hear. Cole told me yesterday that Fairfax’s Melbourne chief executive, Don Churchill, was “at one with me” on the future of print newspapers, but that some other members of management seemed to think, or at least hope, that the bad times for Fairfax papers would fade with the end of the global financial crisis.
Yesterday afternoon Cole expanded on his views at a public lecture at Swinburne University. He said that print newspapers will cease to exist in the United States within 3-6 years. The rate of decline in Australia is more gradual, but he gives us a maximum of 10 years, with the only possible bright spot being weekend newspapers, because they are more like magazines, some of which will continue to do well.
Simons has posted a longer summary of Cole’s thoughts at her blog, Content Makers. Continue reading ‘The web, everyday life and the future of media’
Do they know it’s Christmas?
The summer holidays are perhaps the time of year when the dissonance between most people’s lived experience and the obsessions of the political and pundit class is most starkly on display.
While everyone else is lapping up the sun, or bemoaning having to go back to work, the drumbeat of ideological opinionistas’ fantasies taps away relentlessly on keyboards. The Australian’s op/ed page, for instance, appears to have been indulging itself in a bit of a contest to see if it can print 50 different ways to deny climate change in far fewer days.
And Tony Abbott’s been popping up all over the place. Just as with Rudd, he’s a new opposition leader installed just before an election year.
Let’s consider the contrast with Kevin Rudd, then and now.
Continue reading ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’