Parents Television Council Report on Sex on TV

Posted on August 5, 2008 at 1:45 pm

The Parents Television Council released a new report on the way sex and marriage are portrayed on prime time television this afternoon.
Today’s prime-time television programming is
not merely indifferent to the institution of marriage
and the stabilizing role it plays in our society, it seems
to be actively seeking to undermine marriage by
consistently painting it in a negative light. Nowhere is
this more readily apparent than in the treatment of sex
on television. Sex in the context of marriage is either
non-existent on prime-time broadcast television, or is
depicted as a burdensome rather than as an expression
of love and commitment. By contrast, extra-marital
or adulterous sexual relationships are depicted with
greater frequency and overwhelmingly, as a positive
experience. Across the broadcast networks, verbal
references to non-marital sex outnumbered references
to sex in the context of marriage by nearly 3 to 1;
and scenes depicting or implying sex between nonmarried
partners outnumbered scenes depicting or
implying sex between married partners by a ratio of
nearly 4 to 1. (emphasis in the original)
Most likely due to the competition from cable, DVDs and online media, broadcast television is spending more time on edgy, exotic, transgressive, and disturbing depictions of sexual behavior for the purposes of entertainment, not on a sympathetic or illuminating manner but usually as the source of humor or in the context of law enforcement dramas.
…Even more troubling than the marginalization
of marriage and glorification of non-marital sex on
television is TV’s recent obsession with outré sexual
expression. Today more than ever teens are exposed
to a host of once-taboo sexual behaviors including
threesomes, partner swapping, pedophilia, necrophilia,
bestiality, and sex with prostitutes, to say nothing of
the now-common depictions of strippers, references
to masturbation, pornography, sex toys, and kinky or
fetishistic behaviors. Behaviors that were once seen
as fringe, immoral, or socially destructive have been
given the imprimatur of acceptability by the television
industry — and children are absorbing those messages
and in many cases, imitating that behavior.

(more…)

Desson Thomson on Archetypes in ‘Dark Knight’ and ‘American Teen’

Posted on August 2, 2008 at 10:10 pm

One of the most thoughtful and knowledgeable movie critics I know, Desson Thomson, appeared on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” this week to talk to Scott Simon about what ties “Dark Knight” and the new documentary “American Teen” together — the way they explore archetypes. He has some fascinating insights about the way the documentary was shaped in the editing room and the way that what draws us into superhero movies is seeing both hero and bad guy — like the “American Teen” geek, beauty queen, athlete, and rebel — turn out to be more complicated than we expect.

Ebert’s Farewell to The Balcony

Posted on August 1, 2008 at 2:34 pm

Thanks to my friend Bob Elisberg for directing me to Ebert’s farewell to the 33-year movie review television show he shared with Gene Siskel and then Richard Roeper. That show, “just two guys talking about the movies,” made them into national figures and changed the way people think about movies and movie critics. Be sure to check out the acerbic outtake clips of Ebert and Siskel making promotional spots and setting off the kind of sparks that made the show so much fun. (WARNING: Some very politically incorrect joking and some very strong language — this clip would be rated R)

Good Review of A Bad Film — Cynthia Fuchs on ‘Step Brothers’

Posted on August 1, 2008 at 9:35 am

I often say that when movies are good, critics are very, very good, but when movies are bad, they’re better. It is a challenge sometimes to write an interesting, meaningful review of a dumb comedy like Step Brothers. One of my favorite critics, Cynthia Fuchs, did just that with her review. She did not ask the film to be more than it aspired to be but respected what it was enough to engage with its aspirations and implications within its own terms.
Unable to intervene, ever-pert Nancy (Mary Steenburgen) is, in fact, this spectacle’s ideal audience, the girl who can’t fathom the anti-nuances of masculine ritual. Watching her man-children clobber each other to sweaty, gasping pulps, she’s reduced to abject impropriety… Apparently the only possible punchline for this going-nowhere-slowly scene, Nancy’s exclamation also makes clear the fundamental logic of Step Brothers. Demonstrating (and occasionally exaggerating) the lewd, brutal routines that make up the lengthy, much celebrated transition from boy to man in U.S. consumer culture, the movie has plenty of ground to cover. The fact that it’s ground often traversed in Ferrell’s movies and more recently, in co-producer Judd Apatow’s movies, doesn’t dampen anyone’s enthusiasm or inanity. Rather, the repetition seems to up the ante: how much more can be said, showed, or countenanced? How low can it go?
I love the way she says that films like this “simultaneously to ridicule and celebrate masculinity” and her comment on the role that the female characters play helped me to understand my own reaction:
While they surely ensure that the boys, for all their homoerotic/homophobic rites, are emphatically heterosexual, the women also provide the film’s necessary internal audience. Appalled by manifestations of male insecurities and aggressions, they embody those social, domesticating judgments that make such manifestations seem so wild and crazy. That is, the boys are most plainly appalling when the girls are appalled.

Dennis Lim on Movie Fight Scenes

Posted on July 30, 2008 at 9:48 pm

Anything Dennis Lim writes about movies reflects his exceptional knowledge and insight and is a pleasure to read. His latest piece is about the way fight scenes are staged in movies is terrific — and his insights are accompanied by the film clips that illustrate his points. From a stunning fight between Charlton Heston and Gregory Peck in 1958’s “The Big Country” to “Died Hard,” “Raging Bull,” and “The Matrix,” Lim points out the how the way the fight is shot and edited can convey as wide a range of emotion, character, and plot as the dialogue.
I really like his description of the way that styles in the editing fight scenes have changed over the decades, partly as a result of technology advances that made quicker cuts and shakier, more close-in cameras possible.
Walter Murch, the venerable film editor reflects on how effective cutting keeps audiences grounded as one shot, often imperceptibly, becomes another. The trick is to determine where the viewer’s attention is trained in a particular shot and to cut to a shot that contains a focal point in the same area of the frame. But there is at least one major exception to this rule: the fight scene. “You actually want an element of disorientation–that’s what makes it exciting,” Murch says of his approach to splicing together a fight. “So you put the focus of interest somewhere else, jarringly, and you cut at unexpected moments. You make a tossed salad of it, you abuse the audience’s attention.”
Attention abuse is certainly one way to describe the on-screen tumult that is by now a summer multiplex ritual and that increasingly suggests even more aggressive terms than Murch’s. (Try pureed instead of tossed.)
And what a great description of the influence of the Hong Kong films and of the period when two-men fights briefly were eclipsed by bigger bangs:
Yet ’90s action cinema is a wasteland when it comes to fight scenes. Most of these frat-metal spectaculars, obsessed with scale and volume, were too busy detonating asteroids and dropping fireballs on major metropolitan areas to bother with anything quite as puny as one-on-one combat.
Until “The Matrix” came along, that is.
Here were fights (choreographed by martial-arts veteran Yuen Wo-ping) that defied time and space. CGI was not new, but The Matrix introduced the sense that anything is possible and, what’s more, could be conjured from nothing. The way you feel about most contemporary movies–and their fight scenes–probably depends on whether you find that prospect thrilling or alarming.

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