I would bet that Bollywood today, has a lot in common with that early time…and Nigeria.. did you know that Nigeria has a movie industry??

the simile is, of course, the soft, effete grandson, taking over the huge business, and running it into the ground (like PINCH, running the New York Times from $52 a share down to $18…!!!)

As to Casablanca: I just watched Beowulf .. and say to Roger, if you’ve got a good story, it should move our hearts for generations. And Casablanca is a good story. So, go and sell your version!

to me, this explains the condescending tone of so much of Hollywood today, and the preachy, anti-american, faux-intellectual stories that infest American/Euro movies.

Roger’s take on doing a Casablanca with all the romance and drama, is just too alien to these Ivy League wonders.

Funny. The Lord of the Rings was written by a Catholic who flourished post WW1, and the movie was made by Peter Jackson, who lives in one of the more unimportant outposts of the Anglosphere. Syriana on the other hand, is the product of one of Hollywood’s richest and most successful actors… one who, I think, actual talent is in old fashioned vaudeville…

The 2 hour movie is, I think, a thing of the past. The future of great talent, lies in TV series, like the Sopranos.

There are simply too many venues for entertainment, interactive entertainment, for Hollywood to remain relevant. They’ll continue to score big by turning good books/comics into good movies (Classics like Lord of The Rings or Spiderman), but most of their general fare and particularly their Pat Ourselves On The Back awards shows simply don’t have much appeal to a demographic that Hollywood used to rely on for its bread and butter.

I can spend an evening watching Awards, or I can spend an evening building interactive gaming environments with Neverwinter Nights or one of the many other computer games that come with development tools now. There’s not really much competition anymore.

It’s the movies, Larry. I don’t think the people who make them, make them for us any more – they make something they call a movie, but it’s actually some cinematic chum to throw out in buckets for the proles in flyover states, and to make a bundle in overseas markets. Or to make themselves feel good.

I didn’t watch the Oscars, either… I was working on my own project!

Three years ago, I posted a long essay on “The Daily Brief” blog, (www.ncobrief.com) lamenting the sad affair of the summer blockbuster movie season coming up and not a damn thing did I want to go see. I wrote a long essay about my dream movie, the movie that I wish I could watch, all about the frontier adventure that no one has ever heard about.

I think we also needed to claim back our own stories about those things that made America a place and the people who made it so – the stuff that Hollywood apparently can’t even bear to consider without tittering. What do you know – my dream movie is not a movie yet. but it is a book – “To Truckee’s Trail”. And the project I was working on while not watching the Oscars, was another book, another long advendure of 19th century America that again – hardly anyone has ever heard of.

So, yes – the rest of us have moved on – and it appears that Hollywood hasn’t quite figured that out, yet.

Maybe the movies have changed or perhaps it’s me. My wife and I used to watch a movie (usually a rental) almost every week. We have over 200 titles in our DVD collection. For the past few years, our movie viewing has dropped to maybe one rental every 4 months, if that. I’ve only bought maybe 5 DVDs in the past 2 years. I can walk into a Blockbuster video for the first time in months, go through all of their recent releases, and most of the time I can walk out without finding a single title worth renting. It’s gotten that bad.

So, maybe it’s the movies or maybe it’s me. Most of Hollywood movie industry could dry up and blow away and I’d hardly notice. Their product sucks and I have better things to spend my money and time on.

See An Incident at the Movies for another example of such behavior.

David Foster

I couldn’t understand the reaction (of many, tho not all)– but it seemed to be a sort of embarrassed giggling. As if “there they are, ‘those’ people over ‘there’ doing ‘that’ thing!”.

Anyway, it wasn’t pleasant; it was too revealing.

This was the first Oscars I’d watched in probably five or six years. My baby sis and eldest daughter are visiting, and I was trapped playing Scrabble with them watching the show.

Did want to see the Coen Bros get some props for their far-and-away wonderful work over the years, and gotta admit the new crop of actresses are gorgeous.

Myself, I’m not into the video games, but I now have an extensive DVD collection, and DishNetwork provides me with channels that I can actually find entertainment on: TCM, Discovery, Disney, SciFi, ect