Harry Belafonte on Movies and Race

Posted on January 11, 2014 at 6:36 pm

There has been a lot of conversation about whether enfant terrible critic Armond White heckled director Steve McQueen (“12 Years a Slave”) at the New York Film Critics Circle awards ceremony. What was far more significant were the thoughtful comments from singer, actor, and activist Harry Belafonte, who spoke about the portrayal of African American culture and experience on screen.

A lot’s gone on with Hollywood. A lot could be said about it. But at this moment, I think what is redeeming, what is transformative, is the fact that a genius, an artist, is of African descent, although he’s not from America, he is of America, and he is of that America which is part of his own heritage; made a film called 12 Years a Slave, which is stunning in the most emperial way. So it’s a stage that enters a charge made by The Birth of a Nation, that we were not a people, we were evil, rapists, abusers, absent of intelligence, absent of soul, heart, inside. In this film,12 Years a Slave, Steve steps in and shows us, in an overt way, that the depth and power of cinema is there for now the world to see us in another way. I was five when I saw Tarzan of the Apes, and the one thing I never wanted to be, after seeing that film, was an African. I didn’t want to be associated with anybody that could have been depicted as so useless and meaningless. And yet, life in New York led me to other horizons, other experiences. And now I can say, in my 87th year of life, that I am joyed, I am overjoyed, that I should have lived long enough to see Steve McQueen step into this space and for the first time in the history of cinema, give us a work, a film, that touches the depths of who we are as a people, touches the depths of what America is as a country, and gives us a sense of understanding more deeply what our past has been, how glorious our future will be, and could be.

Critics on Critics: What Words Would You Ban from Reviews?

Posted on January 9, 2014 at 8:00 am

Indiewire’s weekly poll turns the critics on themselves, asking them to disclose what words they would ban from reviews. From “epic” to “game-changer” to “Oscar-worthy,” they tell us what terms are overused, under-specific, and just too easy. I admit to using some of these, and appreciate the reminder, but the fact is that some films are epic and some performances are Oscar-worthy.

“Frozen” Tops the Box Office

Posted on January 6, 2014 at 3:59 pm

In its seventh week out, Disney’s animated musical treat “Frozen” tops the box office, leading off 2014 with another powerful reminder of the market for top quality family movies. The story of the sister princesses did not just beat out the only new release last weekend, the “Paranormal Activity” spin-off “The Marked Ones.” It made more money than high-profile (and R-rated) films featured in all of the year’s “best” lists, “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “American Hustle,” the R-rated comedy “Anchorman 2,” and the second installments of franchise series “Hunger Games” and “Hobbit.” I enjoyed all of those films, but I’m always very happy to see this kind of support for wonderful films that are family-friendly — meaning that they are just as enjoyable for every age. Hollywood, are you listening?

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Nextflix Micro-Genres Are Amazing

Posted on January 6, 2014 at 8:00 am

The closing of the last Blockbuster stores has led to some “end of an era” pontificating and even some meta “end of the era of end of the eras” commentary from Monica Hesse in the Washington Post. For me, it is a chance to think about the moment that got me started as The Movie Mom — watching parents at Blockbuster ask the teenaged clerks if an Adam Sandler movie was appropriate for kids.

I usually had a good idea of what I was looking for, but most of the patrons would stand glassy-eyed in front of the “new releases” shelf or possibly go straight to “action/adventure” or “comedy.” The five or six categories were not very helpful. There are lessons to learn from Blockbuster about the risks of disruptive new technologies. Why didn’t Blockbuster invent Netflix? The ease of ordering by mail and then, even easier, just hitting a button on the computer for immediate streaming could have kept Blockbuster expanding, possibly even into creating its own content, as Neftlix has. They could also have developed the extraordinarily precise and granular “micro-genres” that are a large part of what makes Netflix so user-friendly. Instead of “action/adventure” they have an almost Dewy Decimal-level of specificity, with hundreds of sub-categories so you can find action-classics, action-comedies, action-African American or action-Blaxplotation, action-superheroes, action-thrillers, action-disasters, action-military, etc. The Atlantic has a great story by Alexis C. Madrigal about how the algorithms for defining these micro-genres were developed.

If you use Netflix, you’ve probably wondered about the specific genres that it suggests to you. Some of them just seem so specific that it’s absurd. Emotional Fight-the-System Documentaries? Period Pieces About Royalty Based on Real Life? Foreign Satanic Stories from the 1980s?

If Netflix can show such tiny slices of cinema to any given user, and they have 40 million users, how vast did their set of “personalized genres” need to be to describe the entire Hollywood universe?

This idle wonder turned to rabid fascination when I realized that I could capture each and every microgenre that Netflix’s algorithm has ever created.

Through a combination of elbow grease and spam-level repetition, we discovered that Netflix possesses not several hundred genres, or even several thousand, but 76,897 unique ways to describe types of movies.

I love the list Madrigal provides of some of the best categories:

Emotional Independent Sports Movies
Spy Action & Adventure from the 1930s
Cult Evil Kid Horror Movies
Cult Sports Movies
Sentimental set in Europe Dramas from the 1970s
Visually-striking Foreign Nostalgic Dramas
Japanese Sports Movies
Gritty Discovery Channel Reality TV
Romantic Chinese Crime Movies
Mind-bending Cult Horror Movies from the 1980s
Dark Suspenseful Sci-Fi Horror Movies
Gritty Suspenseful Revenge Westerns
Violent Suspenseful Action & Adventure from the 1980s
Time Travel Movies starring William Hartnell
Romantic Indian Crime Dramas
Evil Kid Horror Movies
Visually-striking Goofy Action & Adventure
British set in Europe Sci-Fi & Fantasy from the 1960s
Dark Suspenseful Gangster Dramas
Critically-acclaimed Emotional Underdog Movies

NSA’s invasion of our privacy is minor compared to the information we cheerfully provide to corporations. This kind of customer-guided big data is just the tip of the iceberg from the kind of individually-tailored marketing we can expect — for good and for bad — in the coming years.

The Present NOT to Buy Your Children Next Christmas

Posted on January 3, 2014 at 7:13 pm

Dreamworks is teaming up with Fuhu, the maker of tablets for children to create the first tablet in which the content provider controls what the user sees. In other words, it’s more like a television. While Amazon sensibly makes sure that its Kindle Fire line gives parents control over the content available to children — and lets them set daily time limits as well — Fuhu gives parents no control at all.

The partnership is a convergence of two business trends. With children as young as 2 or 3 now routinely using their parents’ iPads or smartphones — if the toddlers don’t already have their own — technology companies are racing to introduce gadgets made for smaller and smaller hands. Fuhu itself sold more than two million Nabis in 2013, and its tablets, which are primarily designed for children 6 to 11, now collectively deliver more than 20 million video streams a week.

Entertainment companies have been surprised at how speedily children have taken to tablets, sometimes forgoing TV sets altogether. As a result, DreamWorks, Disney and their competitors are searching for ways to make it easier for users to find their characters on portable devices.

According to the New York Times piece, “Nancy Bernstein, a movie producer who is in charge of creating what she calls ‘character moments’ for the DreamTab, insists that the effort is not simply an advertising opportunity for the studio.” That is absurd. Giving content providers control over the characters and images children see is advertising. Even if the penguins from Madagascar are not specifically promoting a new sequel or toy, they reinforce brand loyalty, which is the whole point of the arrangement. I’m not in favor of tablets for children to begin with, but this is really a new low.