Women make up half of the movie audience, so logic has it that many female directors should be discovered and trained to “represent” their sisters’ stories on the silver screen. In reality, however, filmmaking remains very much a man’s world, and some women have a hard time imposing their will on a recalcitrant movie crew not used to getting orders from a “lady.”
Poor Gwyneth Paltrow. There she was, minding her own business, occasionally starring in films like “Iron Man 3” while living the good life with her husband and children. Then, all of a sudden, People magazine chose her as its most beautiful woman of the world for 2013—and a flurry of dissenting opinions hit the fan!
TV-film producers’ casting choices are often the height and depth of predictability, with studios pairing contract stars with one another in an automatic, serial manner, hoping that one such combination will click with the viewing public. When that happens, several movies starring the love team are made until its popularity wanes due to over-exposure. [...]
Marvin Agustin’s new reality challenge show, “Karinderya Wars,” has just completed its third week of telecasts on TV5. How well is it faring, and who are the front-runners in its search for the best masa cook in the land?
Dramatic shows on local TV are notorious for their penchant for trying to keep viewers watching by coming up with stories that throw in everything— including the baby and the bath water. A glaring example that should be cited for all the wrong reasons is “Perpetua,” shown last Holy Saturday on GMA 7.
On the BBC channel last month, we caught an instructive and cautionary documentary about the formation and training of a new “K-Pop” singing group. The docu informed viewers that Korean musical performances have become big business, grossing almost $200 billion a year!
Literally hundreds of young talents do their darnedest to become show biz stars, but only a handful succeed. What do they have that the others don’t? A major factor appears to be connections.
Last April 8, we made it a point to catch the first telecast of the special medical docu series, “Inside the Human Body,” on Solar News Channel. It was a marvelous introduction to what is obviously a should-see show, so make sure you catch it when all four “chapters” are shown on “marathon replay” starting at 7 p.m. on April 23.
Zaijian Jaranilla may be hanging on to his career as a juvenile actor despite the imminent threat of “galloping adolescence,” but other young actors were more realistically made to “graduate” from a kiddie TV show last month.
Many of the images we see on TV don’t provide good examples for us to emulate, as they are calculated to appeal to our baser instincts and the “least common denominator” in viewers’ interests. Once in a rare while, however, the medium gifts us with inspiring role models of individuals who rise above extreme [...]
On an overseas flight we took recently, we were delighted to catch Meryl Streep’s starrer, “Hope Springs,” in which she plays the wife of Tommy Lee Jones. His character is happy enough in their 30-year union, but she feels that the joy and passion have been leached out of it, and she wants to save it with the help of a marriage counselor (Steve Carell).
For years now, we’ve been urging our film people and educators to preserve and restore our rapidly diminishing cinematic patrimony for future generations to delight in and learn from. Too many of our film classics have been lost forever due to benign neglect and clueless carelessness. We aren’t talking just about the movies of the [...]
