Filed under: Industry, Movies, Numbers | Tags: action movies, Movies, women in film
First, a New Year’s Resolution: I may or may not post a whole lot, but I will at least stop promising posts that don’t materialize.
Anyway, here’s your next linkspam, themed around film. I still have a ton of links on other topics, so more will be coming eventually. However, I’ve got a handful of other things I want to write about (as opposed to copying-and-pasting about), so things will get done as they get done.
The first lot relates to women in action movies:
- Faster Pussycat! Kill! Bill!, on Kill Bill as a milestone, and standard plotlines
- The “people won’t watch female action movies” myth, breaks down the numbers behind action movies with female protagonists
- In Audiences Won’t Go to See an Action Movie That Stars Women, Robert Elisberg further breaks down those numbers.
- (Not about women, but this one was spawned by similar ideas: Why Don’t White Audiences Go See Black Movies?)
- Token female characters in ensemble action movies is about exactly what it sounds like
- The actress behind an iconic action heroine reflects in Sigourney Weaver on the Legacy of ‘Aliens’ & Her Sequel That Hollywood Won’t Make
Next, some technical/behind-the-scenes articles:
- A short course in A video primer in shot-making from Majestic Micro Essays
- Piracy: Enforcement Isn’t Working, Prices Need to Come Down – some interesting ideas about intellectual property
- The “Gray Ones” Fade to Black – notes from a film teacher
- One More Glass Ceiling Shattered: Patty Jenkins Signed to Direct Thor 2 – article also explains why this is important
- Warner Brothers Talk About Plans for Ultraviolet, Flixster, and Johanna Draper Carlson points out the myriad problems with what they’ve said
- Hollywood hooked on sexualizing women and teen girls, a new study from the University of Southern California
- Women Make Up Only 33% of Speaking Roles in Films, commentary on the USC study
- Breaking Dawn Scores 5th Highest Opening Weekend Ever – numbers, numbers, how I love numbers~
- The Good New Days Are Over – discussing the merging of publishing and distributing companies in a variety of industries
Uh-oh. I thought that that would take care of a hefty chunk of the links I’ve stored up, but no such luck. Maybe I’ll get them all done by next year…
Filed under: Industry, Numbers, Resources, TV shows | Tags: Fall 2011, TV shows
I promised a linkspam awhile back, and then avoided doing it because the list of links I’ve been wanting to share is so long. My solution: multiple, themed linkspams. Today, a collection of links about television and TV shows. I don’t necessarily agree with all of them, but they are thought-provoking and/or informative.
First, some articles about how we watch:
- Should We Watch TV Shows from the Beginning?
- Should Continuity Be King in Serialized Television?
- Television re-runs: only 235 episodes to go
- Time Warner Cable’s Stern: We Have to Move Away from Monolithic TV Packages
- In switch, cable operators want to go a la carte
- New broadcast channels offer reasons to pull plug on cable
- Comcast’s MyTV Choice: Is this the future of pay TV bundling?
- Notes on Rewatching
Trends in TV and how to understand how decisions get made about TV shows:
- Down with Television Repeats
- “Do Season Finales Even Matter Anymore?” or “Season Finale, Schmeason Finale. I Don’t Even Know When It’s On!”
- Putting Ratings in Perspective: Today’s Hits are Yesterday’s Bombs
- A Look at the Relationship Between Buzz and Ratings
- The truth about TV ratings, online viewing and sci-fi shows
- TV: Besides Cops, Lawyers and Doctors, What Else Is There?
Some suggestions for and commentary about women and men on TV (three more links relevant to this season in the bottom section):
- Sugar and Spice and Vicious Beatings
- “Parks and Recreation” Open Thread: Feminist Landmarks
- The 25 Best TV Roles for Women
- Five Great Shows About Masculinity — So You Don’t Have To Watch The Terrible New Ones
A few about the real people behind the shows:
- A Tear for Sarah Jane – A Feminist Aca-Obit
- Why Cast a Spotlight on Joss Whedon?
- DGA Report Assesses Director Diversity in Hiring Practices for Episodic Television
And, of course, interesting articles about the new fall season:
- After One Week, Which TV Shows Look Like Hits and Which are on Death Watch?
- It’s time to do or die for high-priced broadcast TV entries
- Women Rock Prime Time
- Lady, Lady, Lady, Lady, UR Doin It Rong
- What Makes a Show Aimed at Women?
- Ratings report: CBS picks up 2 Broke Girls, and old people love Andy Rooney (surprise, surprise)
Whew. I should not have started that this late at night. More installments on the way when I recover.
Filed under: Industry, Numbers, TV shows | Tags: Experian survey, Politics, TV shows
One of the great benefits of a good education that you may only rarely realize you’ve received is a careful cynicism where new information is concerned. Not a knee-jerk, anti-whatever response but the measured withholding of judgment for those precious seconds it takes to double-check that the writer’s conclusions line up with what, in fact, the survey/experiment/analysis found out.
What brought this up is the new Experian survey of Republicans’ and Democrats’ favorite TV shows. Various stories are leading with this graphic:
… follow up with titles like “The Reign of Right-Wing Primetime“, and then proceed to say things like “viewers who vote Republican and identify themselves as conservative are more likely than Democrats to love the biggest hits on TV”. (That’s a typical article, by the way. I’m not trying to pick on it, I just figured it would be easier for all of us if there was only one link.)
So, holding judgment, we look at the list. And what is actually on there? First off, we don’t have any idea what the numbers mean. The list was apparently compiled based on the percentage of viewers who identify with each party, but Glenn Beck’s audience is not 238% Republican. Regardless, the numbers given suggest slim-to-non-existent differences by party in the Republicans’ list (with the exception of political pundit Glenn Beck’s show) and generally larger differences in the Democrats’ list. Additionally, the cutoff number for the Democrats’ list is 117, while the Republicans get 112. Finally, there is some cherry-picking going on here. The Good Wife‘s 124 (Democrat)/119 (Republican ranking should get it on both lists, but it only shows up on the Democrats’. The articles I’ve seen analyzing this study also discuss more shows that don’t show up on these top ten lists, which suggests even more, mmm… selectivity was involved in creating the lists.
Ultimately, what I get out of this list is that, outside of Glenn Beck’s show, Republicans watch popular TV shows. Democrats are likely to watch popular TV shows and also watch more niche programming. Because Democrats are also watching a fair amount of niche programming, it makes sense that they would be less likely to watch the popular shows at the rates Republicans do. From the 30 shows on the two lists, if we take the Republicans’ 112 rating as the low mark, both Democrats and Republicans are watching How I Met Your Mother (113R/112D), Desperate Housewives (116 even), Dancing with the Stars (117R/112D), The Mentalist (119R/116D) and The Good Wife (124D/119R). If I wanted to throw a gross generalization on top of that, I might add that since Democrats have a much lower median income than Republicans they probably have more familiarity with community colleges and therefore a community college-based comedy like Community might be more likely to appeal to them (122D/75R), but that qualified statement is about as far as I’d be willing to go based on the results as given. I kind of want to know how NCIS: Los Angeles did now…
H/T: News for TV Majors
