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Hollywood can't blame Rotten Tomatoes for recent flops
A recent New York Times article highlighted a growing Hollywood industry trend -- if a film does poorly at the box office, blame Rotten Tomatoes. The website, which aggregates movie reviews and assigns a percentage score with anything 60 or above labeled "Fresh" and anything scoring lower labeled "Rotten," is catching a lot of flack for disrupting ticket sales and tanking films. But Yves Bergquist, the director of the Data & Analytics Project at USC's Entertainment Technology Center decided to throw some data at the issue and see if those claims hold up.
UK film critic doesn't understand using HDTV to watch old movies, why kids are on his lawn
Another day, another ignorant article about high definition. This time it's Peter Bradshaw, film critic for Guardian.co.uk, claiming Humphrey Bogart would have any cameraman approximating a "high definition" effect thrown off the set. Blatantly ignoring the fact that movies of that era were made on 35mm film with more resolution than even 1080p Blu-ray can display, Bradshaw claims that instead of a HDTV, viewers would be better off with a standard definition projector and DVDs. This is all in response to a recent Sky ad campaign (check out the video with Sir Anthony Hopkins dropping in Rutger Hauer's Blade Runner monologue after the break, plus the original) promoting the broadcaster's new HD transfers, allowing home viewing of many older films in quality that would be impossible unless you'd seen it the first week in theaters, and with sound that likely surpasses anything available at the time. What someone should explain to Mr. Bradshaw and so many others with this misconception is that HDTV allows us to see the movie closer to the way it was meant to be seen when it was originally mastered, with all the detail that was present. Provided a high quality transfer, there's plenty of reasons to catch old flicks in a new format, so spread the word.
