MORE CRYBABYING FROM GEORGE LUCAS: CLAIMS HAN NEVER SHOT FIRST

Who you gunna believe? George Lucas or your lying eyes?

Well, it’s not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It’s a movie, just a movie. The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.

Granted, Lucas has every right to change his films, every right to make them worse. That is his property. But this absurd stance of dismissing criticism after he alters (dramatically, in some cases) something that was so universally beloved, is truly remarkable. If it’s “just a movie” why the non-stop tweaking?

And the real problem isn’t the tweaks. Lucas is right that films get tweaked all the time. No question. The problem is that he practically forces us to purchase his inferior recuts, and only after we’ve all been stupid enough to do that, does he release the untouched originals.  This is exactly what he did with the DVD release.

If, in this latest Blu-ray release, Lucas would’ve had the decency to include the original cuts of the films, I doubt very much the backlash would be as big as it is.

There’s nothing wrong with being a profiteer. Just don’t pretend you’re something else.

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CINEMARK THEATER CHAIN REFUSES TO SHOW ‘TOWER HEIST’ AS A RESULT OF EARLY VOD PLAN

As I mentioned yesterday, Universal is closing the window on VOD even further, offering Brett Ratner’s upcoming “Tower Heist” just three weeks after its theatrical release on pay-per-view for $59.99.

Theatre owners see the writing on the wall and have now decided to further cut their own throats by becoming even more difficult to deal with. Cinemark is the third largest theatre franchise in America. Translation: a huge chunk of Americans won’t be able to see “Tower Heist” and will now get even more used to WAITING for home video.

With the convenience of Streaming as the future and people becoming more and more unwilling to purchase DVDs, Universal’s attempt to turn those negatives into a positive with this idea is a smart move.

If you have a family of four, $60 is cheap. If you and your buddies see everything new every Friday night, $60 is cheap. We’re not just talking about the ticket price, we’re talking about the obscene cost of food and drinks and gas and parking.

Furthermore, you don’t have to deal with obnoxious theatre-talkers at home, a phenomenon that’s only getting worse — and that, my friends, is solely the fault of crybaby theatre owners like Cinemark.

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This is good news for Netflix, which needed some, and bad news for cable television and outlets like HBO. Streaming is the future and Dreamworks knows it:

Netflix Inc has won a deal to pipe Dreamworks Animation movies starting in 2013, the first time a major Hollywood studio has chosen Internet streaming over traditional pay TV, The New York Times reported on Sunday.

Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg told the newspaper the deal, worth $30 million per picture to Dreamworks over a number of years, was “game-changing” and represented a bet that viewers would soon no longer make distinctions between content streamed on the Internet or through cable.

The Netflix deal means Dreamworks — the studio behind family friendly fare from “Shrek” to “Kung Fu Panda” — is eschewing premium pay-TV operator HBO in favor of online streaming, the Times reported. HBO is a unit of Time Warner Inc. “We are really starting to see a long-term road map of where the industry is headed,” Katzenberg was cited as saying to the newspaper in an interview.

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America wants to watch their entertainment at home and when they want to watch it. Those in Hollywood holding out had better get on the streaming bandwagon and figure out a way to monetize it accordingly, or they will be left behind. We as consumers are increasingly more willing to wait out theatrical and high-priced PPV/DVD rental price windows in order to pay a buck at a Redbox or, better yet, sit back and let it all conveniently stream directly into our home theatre.

Ominous news for Hollywod in today’s Incredible Shrinking L.A. Times:

Broad swaths of the entertainment business declined in 2010. DVD sales were off 13%. Music CD purchases plummeted 19%. Video game sales as well as concert and theater attendance also fell. Even the turnout for America’s favorite pastimes — baseball and NASCAR — was down. And swift changes in technology will make it difficult for Hollywood to capture pre-recession levels of revenue. …

Cable and satellite subscriptions, DVD sales and video rentals long have been the profit pillars that supported Hollywood. Although media executives continue to boast “content is king,” recently released year-end data suggest entertainment companies are vulnerable to the same disruptive forces that imperiled the music and newspaper industries. …

But perhaps most ominously, last summer the pay-television industry suffered an unprecedented net loss — for the first time — of customers, a yellow warning light that consumers may no longer regard cable TV as a must-have utility on par with electricity and phone service.

New content is no longer king because there’s so much of it already out there and available at a much cheaper price and in a more convenient way. Should we pay $10 a piece to drive to a theatre, get raped at the concession stand, and live with the frustration of all the rude talkers during a movie that kinda sucks? Or… Should we hunker down in the comfort of our own home and for the absurdly low Netflix price of $8 a month, stream a favorite movie we haven’t watched in a while or get lost in Season One of some television show we’ve been meaning to try?  (more…)

James Hibberd over at THR has written a terrific article that should cause all kinds of heartburn throughout the left-wing fever swamp we call Hollywood. No one should be surprised that we Republicans like television, but what is surprising is that while Democrats flock in larger numbers to niche programming such as “30 Rock,” ”Mad Men,” and “Dexter,” pleasing we righties appears to be one of the key factors in creating a  mainstream ratings success:

[I]f you look at the list of broadcast shows that are Republican favorites, it closely mirrors the Nielsen top 10 list, whereas Democrats tend to gravitate toward titles likely to have narrower audiences.

To Hollywood, the data suggest a potentially disquieting idea: The TV industry is populated by liberals, but big-league success may require pleasing conservatives. …

“Historically, the shows that have done better are populist, mainstream and give us confidence in our public institutions,” TV historian Tim Brooks says. “For a while in the 1960s and early 1970s, shows started representing social rebellion, but broadcast quickly reverted to Happy Days.”

What has changed is the explosion on cable that has allowed networks to appeal to more specific viewpoints, from Comedy Central’s The Daily Show With Jon Stewart to Fox News’ Glenn Beck. Moreover, if you’re a liberal viewer in a major city (which typically correlates with higher education) and you have such titles as Mad Men and Dexter to watch each week, are you going to also be interested in seeing a paint-by-numbers crime procedural on broadcast or a laugh-track-boosted sitcom? On the scripted side, at least, the explosion of complex dramas on cable may have ceded some of the broadcast ground to what one might label Republican tastes.

Funny how it’s the left who screams the loudest about the loss of the old network monopolies that gave concentrated power to a very few, and yet they seem to be the ones benefiting most from the choices created by an ever-growing cable landscape.  Another takeaway: (more…)

Tonight, HBO’s “Big Love,” which has become tremendous television, runs its season finale.   In spite of the fact that the first large media portrayal of Mormons living and working in America (in my memory) is based around a rogue polygamist family, a truly cultish “compound” of polygamists worshiping a nefarious self-proclaimed prophet (Harry Dean Stanton!), and some corrupt elements of the actual Church of LDS, I gather that at least some Mormons watch each new episode eagerly.  I understand, because however you want to describe the structure of the show or how it portrays the Mormon Church, it has produced one memorable character after another and as many compounding plot twists as the genre can handle so well.  And then there’s the acting – it’s wonderful.

Watch it now or later, but if the premise of one man with three attractive wives somehow turned you off from the series…or let’s say, turned someone in your house off from the series…the show’s exploration of love and family will surprise you with its heart and concern for tradition.  Jeanne Tripplehorn’s performance as “Barb” (the first wife) could carry you through this season alone.  Hey, the main title song is literally “God Only Knows,” with Carl Wilson singing forever through the opening credits.

More about the show after the jump, but here’s my question: how has the show changed or informed your impression of Mormons?  If you’re LDS, what do you think of the show?  (more…)