Culture: Hollywood Movies: Family-fare films gaining new recognition from studios & distributors

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A WorldNetDaily Exclusive (Jul26,2k6), entitled "Family movies best, Hollywood realizes," tells us of what the big movie producers, studios, and distributors are now becoming aware. Besides the sheer payload of family fare, WND also says that "Films with Christian content earn much more money at box office" than, shall we hazard the implication intended, "non-Christian" movies.

Which awkward, and possibly untrue, conceptualization is all too glaring for any critical thinker to entertain regarding the place of (different kinds of) movies in the culture. Or is it?

What does "Christian content" mean here? Content that is compatible with good healthy morality? I put the question this way becaue I do not believe a Christian ethics (that is Christian reflection on morals, mores, and morality according to protestant philosophical-ethical general theory, in the sense of M D Stafleu's "Characters and Relations")--I do not believe such a Christian ethics gives us all that much a different way of being oriented to the good in a given society than much else moral practice, reflection, and guidance does. Ethics is theoretical; morals are more a constellation of attitudes and behaviours.

Movies, by Anaximaximum

Movies that evidence a "Christian content" cannot do that by conveying good moral attitudes and behaviour, but only by including some version of the Gospel story--with lots of lattitude for a Christ-rooted conveyance of a biblical motif in imagined realistic fashion, or allegorically, or exemplarily in regard to contemporary characters (or historically-reconstructed personages, or living persons). "Christian content" =/= "exemplifying or portraying good attitudes and behaviours." Neverthless, of course, let's not discourage the pursuit of positive films of good living and neighbourlihoods, where good morals set the tone or prevail thru an agonistic plot; let's not discourage an explicitly Christian communal pursuit of that goal along with those of other religions who also pursue a similar orientation to daily living.

A group of Christians organized as a film-producing company does not devalue this task by making a movie about a Hindu town where a (moral) problem is confronted and a good outcome ensues (according to God's common grace, we mite add). But this is not the same as a case where the more special pursuit of a good movie focussed to tell a partiucalr kind of story: the story of human sin, awareness thereof and need for grace, and forgiveness. The latter again is precisely the "Christian" in Christian content because it includes some version, implicit or explicit of the Gospel story.

So, when WND swings into a booster mode of dubiously designated "Christian" movies, let's not swallow the hype too uncritically.

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Posted: July 22, 2006
1:00 a.m. Eastern


© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com

Ted Baehr, whose Movieguide website and MOVIEGUIDE magazine have been carrying that message to a congregation of moviemakers for 14 years, tells WorldNetDaily that his message – and the facts – appear to be sinking in.

"Movies with a strong Christian content year after year do better at the box office," he says, citing statistics compiled by the Christian Film & Television Commission, of which he's chairman.

He says over the years those movies have turned in average income of about $160 million. Movies with less significant levels of moral leadership have averaged $60 million, and those at the opposite end of the scale from Christian values have averaged $12 million.

"We've hammered away at that for the last 14 years with our economic analysis of the box office," he said.

But now the trends are shifting. He says the percentage of family-oriented films has risen from 6 percent in 1985 to 45 percent in 2002. And in 1985, 81 percent of the movies were rated R, but fewer than 45 percent of the movies released since 2001 have been R.

A major change surfaced Thursday when, as WorldNetDaily reported, Disney announced that its current cutback in staffing means the R-rating will virtually disappear from its products.

Walt Disney Pictures are released under the Pixar animation label, Disney and Touchstone. Mirimax used to be part but has since been separated to stand alone.

When Disney's move was announced, confirmation came that many of the 650 staff cuts are being made in the Touchstone division, which used to produce the more mature-themed films.

Oren Aviv, newly appointed president of Disney production, says he believes a Disney film always should be something the entire family can enjoy.

"That to us has always defined a Disney movie, and that definitely hasn't changed," he says.

The return-to-family-fare move was made just as Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean" turned in a weekend sales total of $135.6 million and the computer-animated "Cars" has been declared a hit.

The math isn't complicated, Baehr says.

"They can make more money because it's better to sell four tickets to a family than one ticket to a teen," he says.

He does credit Hollywood with good intentions, citing what he perceives as a "real desire" to move in this direction.

His associate at Movieguide, David Outten, also noted yesterday that because of advances in technology, parents have a much larger range of options for entertainment these days.

Citing iPods and video downloads as a "shock wave" for the movie industry, he says on-demand services eventually could make any movie or program available in stores and online services. Already, more than 150 major television programs can be had on iTunes, he said.

That won't mean the end of Hollywood, however, says Baehr. The top quality of audio and video that has been developed is expensive to record, and reports of the death of movies started surfacing about the time VHS tapes arrived, but it's still around, he says.

"Just because you have a kitchen in your home doesn't mean you don't want to go out to a restaurant once in awhile," he says.

The key will be to keep quality in the stories first, with other components such as character, dialogue, music and spectacle following.

He does caution that not every movie that has sound morals is good for children to see. The blockbuster "The Passion of the Christ" isn't good for anyone under 12, while "Schindler's List" has strong redemptive content but also horrific scenes, he says.

And just because it's a children's movie doesn't mean it's good for kids either. "Monster House," he says, has very heavy spiritualist influences.

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Baehr is a movie critic, educator, lecturer and author of "The Media-Wise Family." He's financed a number of feature films, produced many television and radio programs and now is working on several new movies. His MovieGuide site publishes reviews of current movies and features articles and interviews with top filmmakers and stars such as Steven Spielberg and Lindsay Lohan.

Technics: Net software: Large attachments split from message by new Pando

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Technology Evangelist carries a feature by Benjamin Higginbotham, "Pando: A Better Way to Send Large Email Attachments" that pinpoints two areas where email desperately requires upgrading: "file attachments and user authentication. I can’t fix user authentication today, but a product called Pando can fix the problems with attachments."

I can testify to the user authentication problem, as refWrite's publisher has had his name exploited by a notorious character, DrFraud, who used it to make a Yahoo address and then sent a hideous poison-pen email maligning friends to a major Christian institution, and putting refWrite's publisher's name below the signoff "Yours in Christ."

But that's not what Higgie can help us with. He's focussed on the large attachments issue.

E-mail servers like to have text messages sent back and forth. As soon as a user sends a 10MB file, an image for example, it bogs down the servers on both ends, increases the size of the message storage and slows the process of getting new messages for the recipient as their system tries to download the massive attachment.

The solution is to split the message into two parts. When I compose a message that has a 10MB file attached to it and hit send, the text part goes to the e-mail server while the attachment goes to a file server. The recipient would not see a file in the message like they do today, rather they would see a link to the file just like a link to a web site. By splitting the message into two parts the E-mail server does not need to store and process a huge file and the recipient does not have to download a massive file to get the rest of their messages. This is the best case solution. It’s transparent to both the sender and recipient. No special e-mail program is used, the e-mail client knows how to split the messages and where to send each, and so it just works.

I don’t know how to get that best case scenario today, but Pando.com gets us really close. Install the Pando client on your Windows based PC or Macintosh, and using the client you can send a message with up to a 1000MB attachment (that’s 1GB). The attachment will go to their file server while the message will simply have the link to the file. This is fantastic.

TechNotes, by Owlie Scowlie

What Pando does not do today is integrate directly into my Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird or Mail.app applications from the sender side but it does look like they are working on getting direct Outlook support soon.

Ugh! Perhaps the worst of the lot!

Unfortunately this service requires the recipient to also have Pando installed. I believe the solution would be much more powerful if Pando simply embedded a link into the message without requiring any special software. A simple web browser would be a great tool to download. Pando gets us close, but not all the way to the grand attachment vision above.

The reason that Pando requires a special app on the receiving end is that the whole system uses a p2p type model. The advantage of this is that the recipient can start downloading the file before the sender is done uploading, making the time required in the whole process much smaller than it could be. The other advantage is that bandwidth can be shared between the sender and receiving party. This helps keep costs low if not free. I would like to see a system where rather than placing a .pando file in the recipients e-mail, it's a hyperlink that the recipient can click on. This link would open a page that would try and detect a Pando install. If Pando is installed the download would start right away. If Pando is not installed the file would download right in the browser. If the file was not done uploading then the user would have the option to wait for the file or to download Pando to start the x-fer ( = transfer) right away.

By using Pando today I’m able to get 1/2 way to my vision of splitting the message from the attachment. Hopefully soon they will have their Outlook plugin which will make the process almost transparent to both sides. I would really like to seea Thunderbird, Outlook Express and Mail.app plugin as well. It would also be nice if Pando sold server software that an IT department could install on a box next to their mail server. This would allow users inside the building to take advantage of the service without having to use external bandwidth and it should be a lot faster.

For now Pando is in beta but I have found that it works great. If you’re constantly sending messages with large attachments (anything over 1MB in my opinion), do your IT team or E-mail admin a favor... Download and try Pando. They will thank you for it!

About that authentication matter, Higgie trivializes the matter by using the word "spoofing" -

E-mail is an interesting creature. Originally designed for text only this beast has grown out of control with users spoofing names, attachments in excess of 10MB and just plain abuse of the system.

"Spoofing names" gives a lite-hearted quality to the matter, and there must be many occasions lite-heartedness is the name of the game of using someone else's name as an email address (best sent to the person herself / himself); but I would avoid it altogether. Why? Because there's the more usual case where malice is the intention of the serious non-spoofer. What's the correct word for a DrFraud name-abuse email address? Whatever it is, it's hate mail.

Tags: Pando for large email attachments

• technics
• software
• servers
• email
• emailauthentication
• attachmentslrge

Culture: Sport: World Cup glow is gone, but Zidane's headbutt lives

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The hero of the World Cup, its Most Valuable Player, a status which may be stripped from him but remains true enuff his nevertheless, was Zinedine Zidane. A French-born français of Algerian immigrant parentage, Zidane was captain of a team that was composed mostly of immigrant Blacks or the children of immigrants. The team in large part came from the very banlieus that proudced the riots over immigrant youth unemployment, and the structural racial disadvantage that is intrinsic to French society today.

In comparison, Italy fielded an all-white team. It won by a hair, after the l'affaire Zidane-Matrazzi took place for thw whole world to see (but could not hear). It was Matrazzi who hurled an insult at the wrong moment at the wrong footballer. Matrazzi ended up on the ground after getting a headbutt, which you can see replayed over and over at I've Made a Huge Tiny Mistake, a website devoted mostly to sports guffaws. The headbutt was not the guffaw in this case, rather the insulting mouth of Matrazzi who turned many nonhardcore football (soccer) fans sour on the Italian win.

Football / Soccer

If Zidane gets stripped of his honour, then the Italian team should be stripped of its first-place standing as well. In any case, Matrazzi needs to have his mouth washed with something harsh; he disgraced his team, he disgraced his sport, he disgraced the ideal of fair inclusive sport as an emblem of peace and peaceful competion for excellence.

The larger question of the racial composition of Europe's football teams looms large from the incident, but is so much more significant in understanding how Europe, and in this case particularly how France, creates the demand among immigrants of colour to find places in professional sports, shut out as so many of them are from other professions. Julio Godoy of Inter Press Service news agency and writing from Paris, takes a close look at the problem in his article, "World Cup Shows Different Faces of Immigration" (Jul 12,2k6). Click it up – mesdames, mesdemoiselles, et messieurs. - Owlie Scowlie

Tags: Resistance to Pluthero's bad blogging practices

• culture
• sports
• football
• soccer
• worldcup
• zidane
• matrazzi
• racism

Technics: Theory - content/semiotics distinction? 'Feedburner' by John Heileman, Business 2.0, layered semiotically as free ad

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I just came across an article, "Redefining the RSS feed––FeedBurner CEO Dick Costolo tells Business 2.0 Magazine how he plans to put his stamp on the Wild West medium of RSS," by John Heilemann, the article appearing online in Business 2.0 Magazine (June 27,2k6). I became enchanted by the content, and at the same time I thawt of the discourse intextated without inline visuals or live-links as a perfect occasion for visual-enrichment and hypertexting (more radically, I'm interested in the phenom of hyperwording). Even the more limited project of vis-enrich / hypertexting with live-links can not be done all at once (by me). The first new layer––being a visually-enriched second layer and taking the semiotic-semantic significance to a h+er, more complex level than Heilemann in Biz2.0––has already been added by my co-composer Anaximaximum and myself, Owlie Scowlie, for this blog entry. In the immediate case, we're your refWrite team for this semiotically-experimental blog-entry which has already undergone three drafts, and is now being left to dry. It includes hypertext language markup (HTML) in the form of common semiotic devices, that overlap one another in meaning (semantic-grammatical import) where the accumulation of signs can no longer be taken for granted as individual marks for emphasis––for instance, emphasis of acronyms, or individual words more largely, or phrases. In this second semiotic layer also, some URL's make visible links that connect you live whenever you click your cursor on one or another of them (these will be built up over time in this blog-entry), each of the visible live-links taking you away to yet another imaginal /rather, virtual/ universe of some other webpage, probably at some other blogsite / website.

The text below is semiotically-treated by A and OS, as a semiotics analysis / experiment that is derived from a Business 2.0 Magazine magazine article by John Heilemann as mentioned above. Here's Heilemann's plain text with some "second level" semiotic enrichment:

Mention to Dick Costolo that, for most of this generation's Web startups, getting funded has been a snap, and he emits a rueful laugh. "Not for us," recalls the CEO of the content syndication outfit FeedBurner. "Most venture capitalists we met couldn't spell RSS - let alone understand it."

That was in 2004, and Costolo and his three co-founders were toiling in obscurity in their Windy City headquarters. "I don't know how many times we heard, 'We like you guys, but you're in Chicago,'" Costolo says. "Which really meant 'We don't get it.'"

Two and a half years later, a lot more people get it - as FeedBurner's meteoric rise vividly demonstrates. Today the company manages more than 300,000 feeds that use the RSS (really simple syndication) format or a variant thereof, and its customers range from the humblest bloggers to the mightiest publishers: Gannett (Charts), Hearst, Reuters.

Though its success so far has yielded little revenue (and not a dime of profit), the company is now backed by several of the media-savviest [Venture Capitalists] VCs in the business.

What the moneymen believe is that FeedBurner is in the vanguard of the creation of a brand-new medium. And while, God knows, talk like that is cheap, I think they may be right.

The return of "push technology"

Before explaining why that's so, it might be helpful (at least for the uninitiated) to start with the ABCs of feeds. RSS is what used to be called a "push" technology: It lets publishers stream Web content instantly to users who've subscribed to their feeds, and lets users keep up with a large number of sites without having to check them manually.

When new content is posted on a site, subscribers are notified and sent either full versions or summaries of the fresh material (along with links back to the site), which they can read inside what's known as an aggregator, such as NewsGator's FeedDemon [for Windows - Owlie Scowlie]. (Both Firefox and Apple's Safari browser have built-in feed readers.)

Semiote Analytics & Experiment, by Anaximaxium:

[But, sad to say, the last mentioned feature of Safari doesn't make up for that browser's lacks and snags. You're better advised to switch to Firefox 1.5 and a wee h+ier (1.5.0.4), with some really fine "plug-in" extensions (or "add-ons") available - Blogger Web Comments, Linkification, and the jetsetting Greasemonkey for trying JavaScripts for yet other Firefox browser add-ons. – Owlie Scowlie].

RSS began to take off roughly three years ago - and that's when Costolo, then 39 and the founder of two previous startups with the same three partners, saw an opening.

"We thought, if this gets big, it's going to be impossible for content producers to manage," he remembers. "We'll say to publishers, 'Hand us your content to syndicate - we'll run your feeds and provide you a detailed picture of how many subscribers you have, what's being read, where the feeds are going. Then we'll help you monetize them by stapling ads to them.'"

When FeedBurner launched in February 2004, it was instantly popular with bloggers. But commercial publishers were wary, if not outright dismissive.

Technotes, by Owlie Scowlie

"They'd say, 'I only care about feeds in that they drive traffic back to my site,'" Costolo reports. So he reminded the publishers of what happened when the Web boom began. "They tried to use their sites to drive subscriptions to their print products," Costolo says. "I said, 'How'd that work out for you? The new medium never drives dollars to the old; it drives dollars to the new thing.'"

Like the Web 10 years ago, he argued, feeds had reached a tipping point. "You can't stop this train," he told them. "Content is going to be syndicated and consumed all over the place. Your job is to figure out how to turn that into an opportunity."

Incorporating advertising

Crucial to convincing the publishers was that Costolo offered to run their feeds and provide them with subscriber data for free. What they saw when they looked at the data was that "hits to their feeds were going up, up, up, while traffic back to their sites wasn't going up as significantly," Costolo says. "That caused a lot of them to say, 'Shit, there's a lot of money that I'm not making out there on the edges.'"

All along, Costolo thought advertising was the way for publishers to begin to rake in that dough. Initially the company had planned to splice ads from various ad networks into the feeds it manages, taking a cut of the revenue, typically 35 percent.

But Costolo's team soon decided that it made more sense to build [RSS']s own ad network - and one that places ads not just in feeds but also on the publishers' websites. (Such ads, Costolo says, will be "feed-driven." Unlike, say, ads placed through Google's AdSense network, which are typically in a column far away from the post containing the targeted keyword, FeedBurner's will be tightly linked to specific items and positioned in the middle of the page, right under the relevant post.)

With its burgeoning ad network, FeedBurner may be hurling itself into the lion's mouth. As a manager of feeds, the company has no equal.

But as an ad network, it will be in competition with Google (Charts), as well as Yahoo (Charts – music and stocks), AOL, Blogads, ValueClick, and others. Costolo recalls that when he was seeking VC cash, the specter of Google was often raised.

He dismissed it then, but no longer. "I've come around to the view that Google will eventually start managing feeds and monetizing feeds as another way to promote AdSense," he concedes.

Staring down Google

Yet Costolo views the prospect of tangling with Google with striking equanimity. "We have to leverage our critical mass of publishers to create network effects," he says. As an example, Costolo cites plans to allow publishers in the network to form "affinity groups" by blending their feeds together.

[Inserted enumeration below: A.), B.), C.) with bracketed stuff of mine - Owlie Scowlie: ]

He mentions the possibility that

A.) Daily Kos,

[An extreme leftwing blog, main rallying point of extreme left in Democratic Party where the ever-leftier prez-election-loser John Kerry and nomination-as-candidate loser Howard Deane, now National Democratic Party's Chairman are both lionized, or is it eagle-ized? legalized? - Owlie Scowlie]

B.) Talking Points Memo,

[An extreme leftwing blog, main rallying point of extreme left in Democratic Party where the ever-leftier prez-election-loser John Kerry and nomination-as-candidate loser Howard Deane, now National Democratic Party's Chairman are both lionized, or is it eagle-ized? legalized? - Owlie Scowlie]

and C.) a handful of other popular liberal political blogs

[here's a handful of said liberal political blogs, tho I don't know how "popular" they are - OS]

• 1.) The Plank

• 2.) The Arkansas Blog

• 3.) The Online Beat [blog via The Nation]

• 4.) The Notion [blog via The Nation]

• 5.) Editor's Cut [blog via The Nation</a>


might offer a joint feed - leading lefty readers to subscribe to that feed rather than to each individually.

"Then the incentive for all of them would be high to stay in FeedBurner," Costolo says, "because as part of the liberal politics feed, they'd be reaching more people than they would on their own."

Costolo's confidence about fending off Google and other potential rivals also owes to FeedBurner's head start in a market that's racing forward at lightning speed. "For RSS, 2004 was all about blogs, 2005 was all about text publishers, and 2006 is shaping up as the year of audio and video," he says.

Already Apple (Charts -- The Human Body Project and AAPL financial chart [Yahoo! Finance]) has harnessed RSS to potent effect in its iTunes Music Store, which offers thousands of audio and video podcasts for download, each of them powered by a feed.

And although Costolo won't name the companies, he says two entertainment giants are about to start using FeedBurner to drive consumers to social media venues such as MySpace. "Hollywood sees how feeds can contribute to the ecosystem of exposure," Costolo observes.

And FeedBurner intends to make that ecosystem even more complex. For some time the company has been developing a feed-splicing tool to let users create what Costolo calls a "personal content network" - a "feed of me."

"You put your tags in Del.icio.us, your photos in , your friends in ; you have a blog , a podcast [not yet! - OS], etc.," he says. "And we splice it all together into a single feed."

There are, of course, plenty of folks with personal websites. But with a "feed of me," subscribers would be able to track changes in your data at the atomic level - being notified instantly when you add a new photo set or playlist, not just when you update your site.

More important, developers could build new applications to display and manipulate all that data, leading to vast new possibilities for advertising and marketing.

All of which is why I like Costolo's chances in any future battle over this virgin turf - even, dare I say it, with Google. What the guys at FeedBurner understand is that RSS is a brand-new medium, as distinct from the Web as the Web is from newspapers, radio, and TV.

It will be consumed differently and will operate by rules that are foreign not just to traditional publishers but to the titans of the Web. Costolo and his crew don't have all the answers about where this revolution is headed.

But they're asking questions that no one else has even thought of, and that's no small advantage.

- John Heilemann wrote "Pride Before the Fall." His next book is "The Valley." He lives in Brooklyn.



How FeedBurner Works

1 Publishing software is used to create a standard RSS feed.

2 FeedBurner takes the feed and repackages it, making it easier ...

3 ... for advertisers to insert ads wherever the feed appears.

... for consumers to subscribe to it by email, on the Web, or infeed-reading software.

... for the publisher to track the size of his feed audience.

The foregoing alteration, not so much of the textual content but of the semiotic interpretive overlay, at first confined just to what we're calling Level 2 (bolds, underlines, and live-links together) give an accumulated result that alters the graphic experience of the page, hence also of the text.

- Anaximaximum and Owlie Scowlie

Further Resources:

Really Simple Syndication
What is RSS?, by Mark Pilgrim