Narrative Journey

Film and Media Studies resources for learning and debate. Focused for AS & A- Level

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Common Sense Media Tackles Gender Stereotyping

Group signals media needs to do better job and it can help

Common Sense Media, which advocates for kid and family-friendly media, has come up with new tools for parents and content-raters—it is one of the latter—to evaluate media based on "positive gender representations" and to help programmers provide more "healthy, balanced and diverse" portrayals.

Those were based on conversations with parents and a survey of 933 parents of children 2-17 from March 28 to April 18, 2017.

Among the takeaways are that media generally reinforces that masculine traits and behaviors are more valued, that girls should be concerned about appearance and treat themselves as sexual objects "for others' consumption," and that children of color "may be particularly vulnerable" to the impact of media portrayals on gender role development.

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New Rating System Could Change Gender Stereotypes Forever

Being a responsible parent just got one step easier.

A child’s mind is a precious thing, highly susceptible to everything it encounters as if it were the world’s largest sponge. In our youth, what we see, where we see it, and who we see it with all affects the person we become. And our environment dictates a vast amount of our mind’s development, whether the things experienced are real or artificial. That’s why it’s a serious matter that kids today are consuming media at higher rates and increasingly younger ages.

Being that media is such a common factor in our society, it’s an obvious requirement that it should be monitored for what is and isn’t okay for children to watch. The duty of raking through every program may seem daunting, especially to a busy parent, but there’s relief to such a task. The nonprofit media watchdog group Common Sense Media was founded in 2003 to help assist parents in selecting shows and movies they deem appropriate for their children in the form of varied ratings. Through an online survey, parents can pinpoint programs that promote admirable character traits like courage, empathy, and perseverance. This week, the organization introduced a new metric: the portrayal of gender.

The gender roles that television characters act out can actually have a huge affect on how young people view themselves. For example, if a girl grows up watching a large amount of media that features traditional female gender roles such as cooking and cleaning, she’s more likely to believe this is the status quo and follow suit. The same thing rings true for men: if a boy grows up consistently watching shows of a violent or insensitive nature, he’s likely to repeat these behaviors. On Common Sense’s website, a symbol with the phrase “positive gender representations” will appear next to a film or TV show if their reviewers rate it so.

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Wonder women: how this summer's TV passes the Bechdel test

Shows such as Orange is the New Black, GLOW and Claws allow their female characters to do more than just play the girlfriend, signaling important progress

GLOW, Netflix’s new series about a troupe of female wrestlers in the 80s, opens with a dig at the lack of roles for women in the entertainment business. Alison Brie’s Ruth is at an audition, delivering a barnstorming speech about saving the company her father built. The casting director stops proceedings as Ruth wipes away tears. “You’re reading the man’s part,” the director says. Ruth pulls herself together and starts again: “Sorry to interrupt, your wife’s on line two.”

In this very first scene, GLOW sets out a blueprint. It’s an insider joke: the audience can tell from the off that this is not going to be the kind of story where female characters are reduced to playing the love interest.

Television is rediscovering the power of the female ensemble, and this time, it’s spreading its wings. Though TV history is dappled with groups of women, from the Golden Girls to Pretty Little Liars, many shows – particularly those box set must-sees that tend to fall under the prestige banner – struggle to pass the Bechdel test. Famously, the Bechdel test is usually applied to movies and runs a film against the following criteria: a) it has to have at least two women in it, b) who talk to each other, about c) something other than a man. A shocking number of productions fail it. Even Sex and the City centered its characters on their love lives, for the most part, and it’s kindest to quickly pass over its forgettable imitator, Lipstick Jungle.

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In science fiction, the future is feminist | Laurie Penny

Move over, square-jawed straight white heroes. From The Power to The Handmaid’s Tale, fantasy stories about women remaking the world are finally going mainstream

Naomi Alderman’s brilliant science fiction novel The Power justly won the Bailey’s prize for women’s fiction last week. It deserved to win – but I never thought it would.

The unstoppable rise of female-authored and feminist science fiction tends to upset two distinct sets of stuffy traditionalists: sexists and literary snobs. But by insisting that only a certain sort of art is truly great, they’re missing out on some gorgeous books.

It’s always puzzling to meet nerds who have read Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov – but have not read, for example, Ursula K Le Guin and Octavia Butler; or modern literature buffs who worship Ben Lerner but have never heard of Lidia Yuknavitch. More than anything, though, it’s just a pity. If you limit yourself to what feels safe, you’ll miss the very stories that might change your life.

Right now, the real world seems to be out of ideas about how to organise its future – and that’s exactly why women’s fantasy futures feel more necessary than ever. Imagining alternative worlds is a political act, whether you want it to be or not, and for some reason, women and people of colour seem to have a particular facility for building fictional worlds that feel both fresh and feasible

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10 great German Expressionist films

From The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Nosferatu, the trend for shadows, angst and exaggerated sets in 1920s German cinema laid the foundations for everything from film noir to the horror genre.

German Expressionism is one of the most recognisable styles of silent cinema, although it can sometimes be slippery to define. Expressionism is an artistic mode that first appeared in poetry and the visual arts at the beginning of the 20th century, before moving into fields such as theatre, architecture and cinema following the First World War. Offering a subjective representation of the world, Expressionism descends partly from German Romanticism and reveals the angst of its human figures through their distorted, nightmarish surroundings.

In cinema it is most particularly associated with tilting, impossible sets, high angles and deep shadows. The Italian term chiaroscuro is often used to describe the high-contrast arrangement of light and darkness, but German film critic Lotte Eisner preferred a term from her own language: Helldunkel, which she defined as “a sort of twilight of the German soul, expressing itself in shadowy, enigmatic interiors, or in misty, insubstantial landscapes”.

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Netflix and Amazon 'will overtake UK cinema box office spending by 2020'

Film industry will remain ‘pretty healthy’ but DVD and Blu-ray sales will go into ‘terminal collapse’, says PwC

Netflix and Amazon are set to overtake the cinema multiplex after a report predicted that revenues from streaming film and TV shows in the UK will exceed box office takings by 2020.

Paying for TV content from on-demand digital video services will grow by more than 30% to £1.42bn at the turn of the decade, claims consultancy firm PwC. This rise in popularity will see revenue from video services edge ahead of an estimated £1.41bn from cinemagoers.

While Apple and Sky have also made inroads with their download services, the rise of streaming has been the biggest competitive challenge to cinemas in recent years. Netflix and Amazon have attracted millions of viewers in the UK thanks to original dramas such as The Crown and The Man in the High Castle, while Amazon has also hired the BBC’s former Top Gear team to launch the Grand Tour.

“Demand for internet video shows no signs of slowing down,” said Phil Stokes, UK head of entertainment and media at PwC. However, he warned against forecasting the death of blockbusters or the big screens where they are shown. “The figures do not signal the death of film. Look at the box office performance of films such as Star Wars: Rogue One or Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them to see the significant amount of enthusiasm for blockbuster movies out there.”

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For the First Time Ever, a Video Game Qualifies for Oscar Consideration

For the first time ever, a video game is on the Oscar longlist.

For the first time ever, a video game is eligible for an Academy Award. David OReilly’s Everything has gotten overwhelmingly positive reviews and is, most definitely, a different type of game than most of us are used to. But by winning the Jury Prize for Animation at the Vienna Shorts Festival, it’s now on the Oscar “long list,” a historic accomplishment. To be clear, the game isn’t nominated for an Oscar (yet), but it’s on the list of those “films” that qualify for nomination. It’s a list no other video game or interactive project has ever been on.

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Seth Rogen criticises Sony Pictures plan to release 'clean versions' of films

‘Please don’t do this to our movies,’ Sausage Party actor tweets about studio’s scheme to remove ‘adult content’ from some of their PG-13 and R-rated titles

Seth Rogen has criticised a new Sony Pictures initiative to make family friendly versions of its films available to viewers.

Sony’s Clean Version initiative allows home entertainment customers to purchase films that have been edited for broadcast television and in-flight entertainment systems. Under the scheme, “scenes of graphic violence, offensive language, sexual innuendo and other adult content” will be censored or removed from some PG-13 and R-rated movies. So far, “clean versions” of 24 films, including Captain Phillips, Step Brothers and the Spider-Man movies, have been made available to purchase.

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Why Twin Peaks fashion is back in style

Part of the cult appeal of Twin Peaks is in the way it encourages its viewers to look for clues and to participate in the detective process, which gives rise to endless speculation. It is the original water-cooler television. Clothes are no exception to this process. Why does the character of Audrey Horne change from sensible black and white saddle shoes to red kitten heels when she gets to school? The obvious answer is out of adolescent rebellion. However, the repeated close-ups on the shoes throughout the pilot episode draw attention to them and encourage the viewer to speculate on their meaning.

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4 Ways Marketing Makes You Want To Watch Certain Movies

Hollywood is mainly a business, but from time to time it can surprise us with productions that are also a work of art.

Hollywood is mainly a business, but from time to time, it can surprise us with productions that are also works of art. Like in any other industry, it needs a hooking marketing strategy to attract more audience than its competitors. What can be better than exploiting cinematographic resources in a unique and startlingly beautiful way? When does a movie stops being a work of art to become another product in an increasingly competitive market?

La La Land (2016) is a musical full of romance, written and directed by Damien Chazelle. When Chazelle presented his script to Hollywood studios producers, their answer was a resounding “no”, as no other film of the genre had been a success since Chicago won the Best Picture Academy award fourteen years earlier. But Chazelle wouldn’t give up and decided to create Whiplash (2014), another jarring movie with spectacular performances that would surely please the jury of the Academy Awards. With the acclaim and profits obtained from Whiplash, he financed La La Land and proved the world how wrong it was about musicals. La La Land captivated an audience of millions, not only for its plot, but also for its music. Its immense success resulted in 14 Oscar nominations and six awards. Despite its $30 million budget, the film grossed $150 millions in the United States alone. Thus, La La Land managed to please the critics, prove its artistic value, and make money. These are four cornerstones that earned this movie so much success.

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This article's broad aim is to demonstrate how to analyze a music video. I'll consider several videos by Beyoncé as well as a number from music video's history. I'll show how Beyoncé stands as the genre's fulcrum, both formal innovator and historical guardian. I’ll propose a working definition for the genre, and discuss music video's technological and socio-economic influences. I’ll highlight some of the genre’s specificities, as well as show how audiovisual relations have changed, and the ways analysis might attend to technology, platform, and musical style.

Why should we care about music video? Four reasons, I think. The first is its cultural centrality today. It’s one of our most popular forms of moving media. PSY’s “Gangnam Style” has 2 billion hits and Justin Bieber’s “Baby” has 1 billion, numbers approaching a mathematical sublime. It’s also the most viewed content on YouTube, with studies showing that music videos are the most common way for audiences to consume popular music, more than through cds, radio, iTunes, or blogs.[1] Second, its aesthetics have seeped into nearly everything moving and visual, from Transformers and Hunger Games to Bollywood, and television shows like Game of Thrones. Third, it’s a genre with its own conventions, ways of carrying a narrative, eliciting emotions, deploying performers, settings and props, and conveying space and time. I’ve written that YouTube can be thought of as a whoopee cushion, and post-classical cinema as a form that puzzles and pummels the viewer.[2] Music video’s specialty lies in conveying a brief state of bliss. It’s dependent on ephemeralities of color, movement, and sound. Like popular music, music video possesses motifs, rhythms, grain, and fine details that carry weight. It resides somewhere between advertising and art. Fourth, it’s a genre to think with. Music video, as delimited by MTV’s initial launch, is but 35 years old, but it has shape-shifted in response to dramatic technological, aesthetic, institutional, and audience pressures.

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10 Famous Films That Surprisingly Fail The Bechdel Test

Facebook Twitter Buffer reddit The Bechdel Test, if you’re not familiar with it, is a benchmark for movies developed by Alison Bechdel in 1985. For a movie to pass The Bechdel Test, it must contain just one thing – a scene in which two or more named female characters have a conversation (that is, back …

The Bechdel Test, if you’re not familiar with it, is a benchmark for movies developed by Alison Bechdel in 1985. For a movie to pass The Bechdel Test, it must contain just one thing – a scene in which two or more named female characters have a conversation (that is, back and forth dialogue) about anything at all besides men. Anything, even if it’s something stereotypically feminine, like shopping or shoes. It could be about dog poo. It doesn’t matter.

Sounds simple, right? Then it might be kinda shocking to find out that out of 2,500 movies, only about half pass the test. And to be clear, passing doesn’t mean the movie’s good or bad. Failing the test doesn’t mean the movie’s evil or anti-woman, or that passing makes it some sort of strongly feminist movie. It’s just to get people thinking about gender and how it’s presented in film. In fact, the example Bechdel gave as a film that passed the test was Alien, simply because Ripley and Lambert have a brief conversation about the alien. (Let’s ignore the fact that the alien was a walking penis-monster, as this was before the Xenomorphs had established sexes – the Queens weren’t introduced until 1986’s Aliens.)

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Netflix film Okja booed at Cannes Film Festival - BBC News

Okja, which stars Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal, had to be stopped five minutes in.

A screening at the Cannes Film Festival had to be stopped after the film was booed in its first few minutes.

Okja, starring Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal, has been controversial because producer Netflix has refused to screen it in French cinemas.

The audience booed the Netflix logo, which appeared before the film started, and it then became clear the film was playing in the wrong aspect ratio.

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Netflix’s first two films at Cannes could be its last

Netflix is taking two buzzy features to the Cannes Film Festival this year for the first time — The Meyerowitz Stories, the latest from indie darling Noah Baumbach, and Okja, the second...

Netflix is taking two buzzy features to the Cannes Film Festival this year for the first time — The Meyerowitz Stories, the latest from indie darling Noah Baumbach, and Okja, the second English-language film from Snowpiercer director Bong Joon-Ho. But a newly announced Cannes rule might make competition difficult for the platform in the future.

Starting next year, all films that compete at Cannes are required to have a theatrical release in France, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The statement from the film festival doesn’t refer to Netflix directly, instead citing a “new operator” and “unseen situation until now,” and then emphasizing its own “support to the traditional mode of exhibition of cinema in France and in the world.”

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The final frontier: how sci-fi is becoming less male

In Sense8, The OA, Falling Water and Outlander, the notoriously male genre finds itself exploring dreams, feelings, romantic connection – and interpretive dance

Reflecting on the conversations about Doctor Who and gender that always flare up when the lead actor is leaving, showrunner Steven Moffat recently wrote in Doctor Who Monthly: “Science-fiction is notoriously male. You can tell that because everyone wears uniforms and marches around talking about rules. But Doctor Who has always felt to me rather female. It’s full of kindness and compassion and eccentricity and wisdom instead of violence.” His sentiments chime with the current state of sci-fi on telly, which has shifted its gaze from the male to the female.

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Researchers have found a major problem with ‘The Little Mermaid’ and other Disney movies

Why we should think twice before letting kids watch some Disney movies.

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You've Got Mail: the forgotten world of 90s movie websites

Shonky graphics, confusing menus, weird picture galleries … the film websites from the internet’s early days haven’t aged well. So why are they still there?