Digital Film Resources: Limitless Possibilities

This week I have scoured the internet for ten more notable film-related websites. Doing so, I hope to reveal particular points of interest with relation to the overall theme of observing the modern digital film industry. As a result it is my intent to provide a list of ten linkroll points of interest (located to the right) that one may find both resourceful and informative. While visiting the following links one must note the diversity in intent, voice, and design that film sites achieve across the internet. These informative gems touch upon anything from the marketing of motion pictures to the promotion of notable film screenings in the Los Angeles area. Once again, I have utilized guidelines found as judging criteria for The Webby Awards to consider the most important aspects of a film site's strengths and weaknesses. It is my hope that by bringing these sites to the reader's attention, one may recognize the limitless variations of subjects that movies offers web authors and surfers.

A strong site for film trailers, TheMovieBox.Net is particularly special in that it organizes and archives thousands of movie trailers. Furthermore, it is the most consistently updated over all the movie trailer sites I have ever come across, becoming a recommended first stop for anyone interested in viewing the freshest trailers. For another view of the film marketing world, one should visit the IMP Awards website, where countless movie posters have been collected and categorized. Though the site's layout and interactivity are slightly difficult to navigate, the volume of images archived is invaluable for both old and contemporary movies. To find cheap and often free screenings in Los Angeles of both classic and brand new movies, one should visit both CampusCircle.com and the New Beverly Cinema. CampusCircle.com is an entity of the Los Angeles based college magazine Campus Circle and provides free screenings of recent movies before they come out. The New Beverly Cinema will book film-buff centric double features that for a small fee anyone may attend daily and throughout the year. For critical takes on motion pictures themselves, I would recommend visiting the Ebert and Roper Video Archives as well as Cinematheque Top 5 Project. The Ebert and Roper site has archived every movie review broadcasted on the popular ABC TV show At the Movies which was originally hosted by Siskel and Ebert (pictured above) and then changed to Ebert and Roper after Gene Siskel's untimely death in 1999. The site is really fun to visit and explore due to the over five thousand video reviews that have been collected. The Cinematheque Top 5 Project is a very interesting site that intends to compile the top five films of significant critics and scholars, ultimately determining the top movies of select categories and genres. To explore the musical aspect of film from a critical and artistic point of view, FilmSound.org is an incredible resource for learning the intricacies of a filmmaking aspect that is often times the most invisible to audiences. Though the layout and design lacks dynamic graphics and experience, the information provided with text, audio clips, and video content make up for such weaknesses. To turn one's film knowledge and box office prediction skills into competitive entertainment, I would recommend heading over to the Fantasy Moguls website. Similar to fantasy baseball, Fantasy Moguls puts one at the head of an imaginary studio in which he may select a slate of real upcoming movies and battle against his friends to see who selects the most popular, critically, and profitable films in a given season. The graphic layout and navigation of this site is top notch and makes it even more fun to play with numerous statistics and box office projections. Before playing Fantasy Moguls it may benefit a web surfer to check out two great movie news sites. Both Premiere.com and Variety.com provide limitless insight into the film industry. These two web pages are the digital archives and extensions of popular film magazines Premiere and Variety. What is significant in exploring both of these digital magazine sites is a wealth of information, as well as the high quality of experience and design. These two links are not only of the highest visual achievement for any movie news site I have visited; they are also the most reliable due to their connection to credible published material. While I could list interesting sites all day one should ultimately forge fourth amongst the aforementioned websites with the intent to explore new sides of movie content in a digital setting. If anything, the diversity of these sites, when compiled, illustrates the limitless capabilities of navigating information on the internet and the limitless possibilities of digital film resources.

Fresh and Rotten Tomatoes: Do Reviews Really Matter Anymore?

This weekend, Director Roland Emmerich's (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow) prehistoric action-epic 10,000 BC opened to an impressive $35,730,000 domestically. In only three days since it's release on Friday, March 7th the film has already hit a financial benchmark crowning it with the second highest opening weekend so far this year. Having opened worldwide since Wednesday the 5th, the film has in only five days tallied up box office receipts nearing $61 million. While these numbers already surpass half the film's production budget, a reported $105 million, industry insiders face minimal shock. These numbers are simply business.

A Hollywood blockbuster in every sense, 10,000 BC foregrounds scope, style, and special effects over character and story, ultimately gaining recognition across the internet as the highest-grossing, lowest-quality motion picture in years. Compiling nearly every critical review of the film, Rotten Tomatoes is a premier film review archive that weighs positive critiques against the negative, ultimately calculating a percentage deemed the film's "freshness." Thus far, 10,000 BC has received a 07% rating. That is, in regard to "freshness" or quality, only seven-percent of all film critics covered by Rotten Tomatoes think the film is worth watching. In an article on the site's main page summarizing the weekend box office results, writer Gitesh Pandya notes a possible key to the film's success--a trend that has become commonplace in Hollywood: "A strong marketing push led by a brilliantly exciting trailer helped to draw in a sizable audience which disregarded the dismal reviews." What one must wonder then is: how did audiences disregard the fact that critics panned this film, and furthermore: do reviews really matter anymore?

At one time, in fact, reviews did mean something. Before the birth of the blockbuster (with 1975's Jaws and '77's Star Wars) the movies were a medium of entertainment and art form and not nearly as profit driven as today. In 1972, writer/director Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather grossed a world-wide total of $245,066,411. As was often the case in the early seventies, it opened small at $302,393--only 0.2% of the film's overall gross. Produced for a mere $6 million, The Godfather could only be a hit by gaining word of mouth, and exciting audiences through shining reviews in newspapers and on television. The film ultimately played in theaters across the world for over a year. In those days, poor reviews could kill a film and positive ones nearly guaranteed success. According to Rotten Tomatoes, The Godfather's "freshness" rates at 100%, having won three Academy Awards and named AFI's #2 greatest motion picture of all time (Citizen Kane took the top spot).

Perhaps it is presumptuous to assume that the correlation between good films and good reviews should, as in the seventies, still garner high box office success. Unfortunately, in an era where giant multiplexes open films at thousands of theaters (10,000 BC opened on 3,410 screens in its first weekend as opposed to The Godfather's 6) and marketing campaign budgets sometimes equal film production budgets, audiences seem more willing to watch movies that impress with visual sizzle and an easily accessible high-concept. Compare the log lines of the two aforementioned films as provided on the Rotten Tomatoes site. The Godfather is summarized as "an epic tale of Mafia life in America during the 1940s and 1950s." Not bad, but it sounds a little complicated, and long. I'm not sure my MTV generation mind can comprehend a story spanning two decades. As for 10,000 BC's log line: "a sweeping odyssey into a mythical age of prophesies and gods, when spirits rule the land and mighty mammoths shake the earth." Now at least that sounds exciting. The posters look exciting, the TV commercials look exciting, hell even the actors are attractive twenty-somethings. That gets me excited! So why do audiences disregard the fact that despite the excitement Emmerich's film promises, the USA Today review labeled it a "bombastic bore?" Is it that people do not read reviews, or that people simply don't care for the opinions of strangers?

In Hollywood, the greatest singular factor to ensure popularity lays in strong word of mouth. Audiences would easily trust a friend's recommendation over a critic's because it is more personal, and often times more exciting for one to seek a movie out on his own rather than become force fed. One film that has proved successful both critically and financially also happens to be a film that in the last year gained increased word of mouth (amongst critics and audiences alike) before a national release: director Jason Reitman's Juno. Receiving a 93% "freshness" rating, Juno has been praised for its great characters and story. In fact, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences seem to agree, awarding its script and first-time screenwriter Diablo Cody the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Juno is a film about people and relationships more than a single high-concept log line. Its trailer plays up the comedy and actors' performances rather than stunning imagery and an epic scope. Overall, Juno, while not only a critical success, has received $186,337,533 at the box-office world wide, becoming a rarity amongst Hollywood blockbusters.

Over the weekend I visited a screenwriter's conference where scripter Jeff Nathanson spoke of two Hollywoods: the smaller independent films that focus on character and story and the Hollywood "tentpoles" that are created most specifically for profit. While most people recognize that every review discouraged audiences to see 10,000 BC, people desired something visual (and ultimately forgettable) that one cannot see anywhere but the movies. While these circus acts may delight, they are, as Nathanson explained "alot of sizzle with no steak." While paying for a ticket to 10,000 BC may bring you back to Roland Emmerich's vision of prehistoric days, smaller films like Juno can take an audience somewhere emotionally. The blockbuster game is often hit or miss, but when quality films come calling, audiences must listen. Even if that call is from a stranger.

Navigating Cinema Resources: Ten Essential Film Sites

This week I focused on what I have determined as essential film sites on the web. In selecting these personal top ten film sites, I will analyze each by following web judging criteria set out by the Webby Awards (or, in the case of a blog, the IMSA Criteria). The Webby Awards judging criteria: content, structure and navigation, visual design, functionality, interactivity, and overall experience, must be considered as an essential element of each site and in weighing these criteria, will determine the significance of that site. Ultimately, considering that each of these sites relate to the modern film industry in a specific way, while also effectively embodying the desired subject of this blog (observing the modern digital film industry), it is my duty to consider the supreme effectiveness of each site with regard to it's usefulness in the modern digital film industry. Please note that the ten sites are located to the right of this post under the heading "linkroll."

One of the web's premier film blog sites, /Film (or "Slashfilm"), brings current film, celebrity, and business news to its readers while creating a stylized platform for discussion on these topics in an easy and accessible fashion. This is a great site for anyone interested in learning current film news and discussing it with others, but could be improved with a better focus on a visual and aural experience. Another one of the web's most popular film sites, Ain't it Cool News founder and reporter Harry Knowles has even become somewhat of a national celebrity, being pictured along side this post in an image from Entertainment Weekly. The news post and film review based site lacks music and sound, but creates a somewhat cartoon-like visual style that always adds and never diminishes the site's experience. Whether it is gross profit statistics or original articles on box office estimates, anyone interested in the numbers side of film profits should visit Box Office Mojo. While neatly structured, this site orders its statistics cleverly (every wondered what films made the top 100 domestic grosses adjusted for ticket price inflation?), and never fails to impress in terms of navigation and experience. Box Office Mojo, as with most film sites, lacks sound and high-end graphic design, but is so fun to visit you would easily agree it simply does not need it. Out of any movie news website, ComingSoon.net is the greatest resource for film business news, such as articles from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, providing it for free and with more style than any of the other great film sites. Visually captivating and easy to navigate, ComingSoon.net is by far one of the most enjoyable sites to visit for anyone who loves movies, trailers, pictures, reviews, box office reports, and message boards. For a website with elegant graphic design and thorough high definition disc reviews, High-Def Digest is a must. Cataloging every move in the emerging next-gen home entertainment front, High-Def Digest does a masterful job integrating both HD DVD and Blu-ray formats in a simple and accessible way, while providing a diverse forum that includes information on disc bargains and general sales data. While most individuals familiar with IGN.com know the site is generally geared towards video games, I would recommend taking a look at their the beautifully crafted IGN Movies page. The site's complexity, while possibly daunting to those who prefer less imagery on a single page, provides a wide range of unique features such as sections dedicated to movie news podcasts, DVDs, soundtracks, home video price comparisons, and even Direct2Drive movie and media downloads. The video game based origins of this site do however shine though, unfortunately targeting film audiences more than those interested in the behind the scenes side of the film industry. One of the web's greatest resources with regard to the film industry past and present is the Internet Movie Database or the commonly known as IMDB. IMDB works as a search engine where one may navigate through movies and TV show pages and the people who worked on them. In a way this site is the digital resume of everyone that has been credited with working on a film or television show. Ever! The experience is incredibly user friendly with little room for improvement and continues to add features such as daily industry and celebrity news, TV listings, box office reports, and message boards. One website that adds its own personal flair to movie news is JoBlo.com. Both elegantly designed and easy to navigate, JoBlo.com contains an extensive script library (for free), as well as humorous articles driven by person takes on the film industry such as the continuing series "Come on Hollywood!" The only problem with this site is that it does not report news as frequently as most of the other sites like it, but when it does, JoBlo.com always adds its own signature point of view and "extra tid-bit" facts to each news item, making up for any slack. Netflix is a revolutionary web based home video rental site that provides constant recommendations (based upon your personal ratings of movies) and trailers for most movies on the site. Overall, it is very consumer friendly in affordability and deeply illustrious in size and title diversity. You can find just about anything you could imagine on Netflix. The greatest resource for film criticism on the web, Rotten Tomatoes compiles numerous film reviews and then rates its "freshness" percentage (or degree of quality). Aside from Rotten Tomatoes' highly successful visual component (another subsidiary of IGN), its greatest strength lies in the fact that it caters to those who want to simply get a vague sense of the critical response surrounding a film (its "freshness"), while also linking to over hundreds of movie reviews per film (if you would prefer to read a few). Once again, as with all the sites I have covered, there is no sound and little video, but the graphic design and resourcefulness of this site makes it great and nearly perfect for those interested in reading movie reviews.

Interestingly enough, none of the aforementioned sites are fueled by scholarly associations or contain a visual experience of the highest quality. This is true, however, of the web's strongest, most visited, and most renowned of film websites to date. These sites, rather, foreground content over flare and do so in a practical and highly intelligent way, combining authoritative insights with a great wealth of facts and information.