DVD // Current TV

United Kingdom Talk Tuesday 13th April 2010

Tuesday's edition of my three times a week talk show.Watch the show here on... more

ChrisReardon
added this
2 years ago
|
1 comment

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Whatever you do BEWARE of this PUKE Bad Lieutenant.

Thee_Mystified
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

My LOST life

I never understood why people love watching television. When someone would tell me... more

joshuaheller
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

SuperNews! recap 1.14

Did you watch last night's SuperNews!? This is a recap of last night's... more

joshuaheller
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

From music to movies to newspapers, the media industries are struggling to figure out how to use the Internet without losing their shirts. With some combination of envy and disgust, they've watched from the sidelines as the pornography industry seized every opportunity to get before the wider audience all of them sought. But today, the technology that once pushed the adult industry forward is stripping away its profits.

The 14-billion-dollar-a-year industry is facing its most serious economic slump in decades. Porn producers led the way in technological innovation and media distribution in the '80s and '90s. They were often credited with ensuring the domination of VHS over Betamax in the costly war for control of the format used on home video tapes. They boosted cable subscriptions, popularized the DVD as the successor to tape and leapt onto the Internet as the obvious new vehicle to give people access to porn in the privacy offered by their personal computer screens. Secure online payment systems and streaming video, not to mention nuisances such as spyware and spam, advanced with the increasing popularity of porn and the public's apparently insatiable appetite for watching online sex.

When I proposed to my bosses at Current TV that I look at the porn industry for answers to the quandary of other popular media, eyebrows shot up around the office. Was this just an excuse to look at porn at the office and hang out with naked women all day? As I ventured behind the scenes, what I saw surprised me in ways I never expected. The business people and techies I met were young professionals with credentials as impressive as those from some of the hot Silicon Valley startups. And contrary to their image as Internet pioneers with an ever-increasing market, I found porn producers just as perplexed as other media as piracy and the plummeting costs of production sucked away the sizable profits they used to enjoy. Even the sex has changed in the race to keep a step ahead of copyright thieves and amateur porn pushers. It's never been clearer that if the industry wants to survive in this day of age, it needs to adapt to a changing marketplace.

Editing "Porn 2.0" for Vanguard's documentary series was a challenge because the subject matter we were covering could not be shown on television. At the same time, we couldn't just show the talking heads of industry executives bemoaning the downturn. On the first day of work for our new crop of interns, I handed out a boxful of hardcore adult DVDs and told them to look for some "tasteful" clips we could use on the air. I knew the assignment would either get me called on the carpet for offending the newbies or go down in Current history as the coolest internship assignment ever. Luckily, it was the latter.

Vanguard: Porn 2.0 (Video)

Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- What world have we entered? - Mitch Koss
- Hey Electronic Arts, when you going to do a pirate video game? - Kaj Larsen
- Christof’s Doc, the Porn Community, and Obscenity… - Mitch Koss
- You Have a College Degree: So What? - Tracey Chang
- What Transformers 2 has to do with Japan's falling population - Adam Yamaguchi
- Why Should You Trust Us? - Mitch KossFrom music to movies to newspapers, the media industries are struggling to figure out... more

Christof
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

Christof’s Doc, the Porn Community, and Obscenity…

Since today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was going to... more

MitchKoss
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

DVDo's and DVDon'ts for Feb. 16

As the post-V.D. doldrums start to take affect, worry not gentle reader.... more

jlichman
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

DVDo's and DVDon'ts for 2/2

Another Tuesday means you've got an overwhelming amount of DVD choices.... more

jlichman
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

Speaking of Harry Potter On Blu-Ray

Oh wait, did I forget to tell you if the new Harry Potter Blu-Ray special editions... more

jlichman
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

Tuesday’s Fresh/Rotten/Bland DVDo and DVDon’t Round-Up for 11/17

From sci-fi remakes to pseudo-shock doctrines, this Tuesday has them all new on... more

jlichman
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

We're Watching: Ten Minutes from The Carter

A good documentary can be judged by how much the subject doesn't want you to... more

jlichman
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

Let's "Sommer-Size" It!

Thank god the G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is coming out on DVD November 3rd. I... more

jlichman
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

The Saddest Paragraph We Read Today: Garfield Pet Force

My only hope: Caleb Goellner wrote this at gunpoint. Based on the “Pet... more

jlichman
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

Porn 2.0 - Christof Putzel's Vanguard documentary

Last night Vanguard premiered Porn 2.0, correspondent Christof Putzel's revealing... more

afitzgerald
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

Ten Sci-fi Movies That Need to Be on DVD

Most of these "films" are pretty bad. Okay, really bad. But it would still... more

booksellergirl
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

Funimation Comments Further on Vampire Bund Edits

Due to the incident last year of a man that was arrested for ordering Japanese comic... more

Agent_Alpha
added this
2 years ago
|
1 comment

'Avatar' Blu-ray/DVD set for Earth Day release on April 22, but no 3D version just yet (VIDEO)

How will the biggest film in motion picture history play in its eagerly awaited home... more

MediaJor
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

DVD Review: The James Dean Story

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51GBBSG551L._SL120_.jpg

Author: Dan Schneider — Published: Mar 10, 2010 at 8:05 pm

One of the best aspects of the DVD revolution has been the rescuing of films (especially documentaries) that would long ago have fallen into deterioration. My wife recently purchased a GoodTimes DVD of the 79-minute long 1957 documentary film The James Dean Story, directed by George W. George and Robert Altman, who, long before his fictive film breakthrough with M*A*S*H, was a documentary and commercial television director.

The interesting thing about this black and white documentary is not its subject matter, but its approach. On the negative side, unlike most modern documentaries, the film is flowery, verbose, purple prosed to death, and melodramatically stentorian in its screenplay descriptions of the dead young actor’s moods. In short, it is a virtual hagiography. Yet, in its setups to interviewing real life friends and acquaintances of Dean, there is something interesting about the voice-over narration of character actor Martin Gabel as he ‘talks’ to the interviewees. Also, there are some interesting cutting techniques and musical selections that make the film oddly gripping to watch.

The film’s ‘tale’ consists of following Dean from boyhood to UCLA to New York and the Actors Studio to television to his three noted film roles in East Of Eden, Rebel Without A Cause, and Giant. The best parts of the film are those insights provided by the hangers-on who give small details of Dean’s life — a former roommate, as example, pores through Dean’s personal effects and one learns that Dean was poorly organized and terminally late on bills. This says far more of the man than later documentary films on him, which probed (or rather obsessed on) whether or not he was gay. Part of this aspect of the film’s success has to do with the ‘screenplay’ by Stewart Stern (Dean’s pal, who also scripted Rebel Without A Cause).

However, the film’s aforementioned purple prose has to also be laid at Stewart’s feet. Likewise, the fawning hagiographic depictions of Dean, which start from the opening shots of 1950s moviegoers, get to be a bit much, resulting in some really poor symbolism, from ‘the tree of loneliness’ on Dean’s relative’s Indiana farm, to a dead seagull on a California beach to footprints on that selfsame beach, when Dean departs for New York to make it on Broadway. The worst aspect of this tendency results in a digression on Dean’s delve into other arts — painting and sculpture. Thus, we get a shot of a small piece of sculpture, with a male figure in a sort of Le Penseur (The Thinker) of Rodin pose. We see that it has no facial details, and the film makes a big thing out of this, even though there are no other details of the body. Why? Because Dean titled the piece Self. Oo-la-la!

On the other hand (yes, I am as equivocal as the film), there is something very appealing about a documentary that dares to psychologize its subject (if not to the point of the Self digression), because so many documentaries these days try to feign objectivity to the breaking point, even when, a la Michael Moore, their position, pro or con, is manifest from the get-go. Similarly, the personal accounts of Dean seem far more genuine than later documentaries in which interviewees seem to mug for the camera, and pull apocryphal tales out of their asses, just to get their own lousy 15 minutes in the sun. The interviewees here are speaking contemporaneously, before Dean’s legend really took off, and there is none of the deliberate or unintended fuzzing of memories toward the better angels of Dean’s nature.

The lone exception to this particular good quality of the film is a scene where Altman gets the family and friends of Dean to re-enact their reactions to first hearing of Dean’s death in a car crash of his Porsche on September 30, 1955. What makes this section so poor a piece of filmmaking is the fact that earlier we get to listen to a surreptitiously recorded ‘real’ conversation between Dean and his relatives, and the contrast between that and the ‘scripted’ parts is so great. Also, the film makes good use of the slow panning technique over still photographs that would later be used so successfully by documentarian Ken Burns. However, a caveat should be noted, and that is that the reason the technique works so well in the film is that the source photos are so intriguing. Yes, Dean comes off as a terminal narcissist, but he really did know how to strike the pose, and surround himself with photographer pals to immortalize himself.That said, the film, even at its mere 79 minutes of length, tends to wear a bit thin after the hour mark, because the reality is that Dean, despite this film’s best intentions and claims, was not a particularly good actor. He was a relentless and born ham, and one need only watch Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, vis-à-vis Dean, to see the gulf between good and mediocre Method actors. Yet, while scenes from his films are few, there are some good passages with some of Dean’s friends from New York and Los Angeles restaurants, some outtakes from films, newsreels of the opening of Giant, and a Public Service Announcement for safe driving, which more than make up for the film’s deficiencies. Thus, The James Dean Story is a film and DVD worth watching, even if there are no extras, for its dated style becomes that rare quality that enhances even as it detracts. When was the last time you engaged a piece of art you could say even that of?http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51GBBSG551L._SL120_.jpg Author: Dan Schneider... more

EthicalVegan
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

New Trailer for The Prisoner

Well I'm going to watch this because it looks awesome and yay Ian McKellen. Never... more

Mcellie
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

John Lennon Biopic Set For DVD Release

The John Lennon biopic, Nowhere Boy, is set for DVD release later this year. The film,... more

CarlosG
added this
2 years ago
|
0 comments

select your country

Community Spotlight

TAGS

tagged w/ DVD

top videos

find current on tv

find current online

recent comments

© 2012 Current TV, LLC All Rights Reserved

the basics

follow us online

tools

stay in touch

© 2012 Current TV, LLC
All Rights Reserved