It is the middle of summer and already the air has taken an autumn chill courtesy of the mid-season box office report. Technically, the box office is up by 10 per cent. In reality, this is due to a couple of films that have done...
Reading Hollywood news reports is a lot like reading Pravda and Izvestia back in the days of the old Soviet Union. You have to read heavily between the lines and ignore most of what is said. This is especially true of the recent series of studio...
Life is full of ironies. After all, it is pretty ironic that a book detailing how an underfunded professional baseball team was transformed into a budget-friendly powerhouse would actually be a primer on statistics and the need to radically revamp how the statistics are determined...
Before the beginning of the silly season (better known as the Summer Releases), I predicted the impending demise of the big budget tent pole movie. But gee whiz, gosh golly, gee bang oh molly, with the whopping big opening weekend of Transformers: Revenge of the...
The great thing about the internet is the widespread availability of information. Lots and lots of little strings of information, all floating in the free-fall zone of the Web. So much information that people rarely have time to contrast and compare -- and we all...
A reporter recently got me to play the voice of doom for the summer releases. The role comes naturally, since I favor black in my personal attire, so I spent a few minutes expounding upon the likely demise of the big-budget movies that are now...
There are several major kinds of secrets in life. There are the secrets that everybody knows but is not suppose to talk about (e.g., the bunker underneath the vice president's mansion). Then there's the stuff people won't tell you about because they expect you to learn...
General George S. Patton once opined that Americans can't stand a loser. He may have been right. Too bad. Sometimes failure is the perfect path toward learning. Certainly it is part of life's learning curve. In some ways, losing is what the entire film industry is...
The YouTube movie is coming, sort of. Actually, the YouTube movie is already here, with the most recent proof coming in August. The impending release of District 9 by Neill Blomkamp is, in part, a tribute to the increasingly pivotal role played by online media...
Yes, it's official. This summer, everyone is a winner. Wolverine has clawed his way to the top. Star Trek has blasted into orbit. Angels and Demons soared into heaven. According to the major news media, the engines of fantasy are running full throttle and business...