Week Ending 2nd December, 2001	Page 3 2 1
Another Nail In The Coffin Of Super 8	posted 29 Nov 2001
If, like me, you began dabbling with film prior to the late 90's, then the chances are that you started out making crappy shorts on a secondhand Super 8 camera. With the home market switching to video and the indie crowd moving on to 16mm and DV, however, this plucky little format has pretty much had its day... As a final confirmation of its passing, the Melbourne Super 8 Group has announced that after 16 years and 10 film festivals, it will cease to exist on December 9...
Who Wants To Be A - Cough! - Millionaire	posted 29 Nov 2001
Three Britons were recently arrested for cheating on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Apparently, one of this treacherous trio was relaying the correct answers to another, who was a contestant, by coughing... The thing that has me scratching my head here is that I thought contestants could ask someone else for help, so why would you bother concocting this elaborate subterfuge? (Thanks to Anthony for this)
See No Evil With Movie Mask	posted 29 Nov 2001
Arriving just in time for Christmas is Movie Mask, a software system 'gives you the choice to watch any movie at your comfort level'. If you're worried that the DVD your weird uncle has given you may contain rude words or nasty violence or ghastly nudity, simply load up Movie Mask, select the "Masked" option, and all this offensive material will be skipped over... (What's really interesting about the blurb on this site is that there's not a single mention about using it to "protect" children. This telling omission just serves to underline the fact that deep down all these calls for tighter censorship are less about saving kiddies from harm, and more about a few easily-offended fanatics trying to reshape the world in their own image...) Your thoughts?
Local Films Trounce Hollywood in East Asia	posted 29 Nov 2001
Far Eastern Economic Review reports that for the first time in many years, local films have topped the box office lists in all the major markets in East Asia. (ie Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Thailand) In some places, their dominance has been so great that Hollywood films have struggled to make it into the top ten. This is pretty big news for the film industry in our region so you'd anticipate that it would receive coverage in the film sections of our major newspapers... Well, you would if Australia was an outward-looking country that took multiculturalism seriously... Personally, I'm not holding my breath... But I'd be more than happy to be proved wrong
Lawrence Fishburne Is A Lucky Bastard !	posted 29 Nov 2001
He gets freeways built for him!... As yet another example of Hollywood excess, the crew of the Matrix sequel recently built a two mile stretch of freeway just so they could film Larry doing some post-apocalyptic driving on it. (OK, rebuilding the Titanic I can understand, but surely they could've found a stretch of pre-existing freeway to film on somewhere!) Some good came out of it all at least - when the freeway was demolished at the end of shooting, it was recycled as building materials for low-income housing in Mexico.
Franchise Films And The Power Of Openingweekend Hypnosis	posted 28 Nov 2001
In this article on the rise of franchise films (ie blockbusters that spawn unadventurous sequels), Patrick Goldstein suggests that part of the reason audiences are being bombarded by sequel after homogenised sequel is that they have come to fear creative surprises... Like Trekkies who would lynch any director who tried to do anything truly different with the well-worn formula, we have become wary of radical departures and crave the endless regurgitation of the original instead.
Bollywood Returns to Afghanistan	posted 28 Nov 2001
With cinemas reopening in Kabul, Bollywood is looking to resume its traditional ties with Afghanistan. Prior to the Taleban coming to power, Afghanistan was actually the largest market for Bollywood films outside the Indian subcontinent, and Hindi film stars had such huge followings there that they could film on location in cival war zones without fear of being attacked by either side. (As an interesting aside, this article comes BBC News Online, which is easily the best source of Bollywood news outside India. This speaks volumes, I believe, about just how British culture is evolving...)
The Most Anticipated Review of the Year	posted 28 Nov 2001
Yes, its everyone's favourite fundamentalists, ChildCare Action Project, raining down their righteous fury on Hollywood's latest threat to family values, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. (As an aside, notice the change of the title of this film for American distribution. Are they really that stupid that they don't know what a "philosopher" is?...)
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