September 2006

The Good Shepherd is Robert De Niro’s second film as a director and depicts the early years of the CIA. Scripted by Eric Roth it stars Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, De Niro, William Hurt, Joe Pesci, Billy Crudup and Alec Baldwin.

It could well be an contender this awards season and opens in the US on December 22nd and in the UK on January 19th.

The trailer can be seen at here at Moviefone and here at YouTube.

> IMDb entry for The Good Shepherd
> Wikipedia entry for James Jesus Angleton (the real life inspiration for Matt Damon’s character in the film)
> Article on the editing of the film
> Plot Summary at Coming Soon
> Production stills at Coming Soon

Fancy buying YouTube? The New York Post and Techcrunch are reporting that site’s current owners value themselves at $1.5 billion.

Sam Gustin of The Post reports:

Internet upstart YouTube, the bane-du-jour of copyright holders everywhere, won’t sell itself for anything less than $1.5 billion, The Post has learned.

But that number far exceeds the price top media execs appear willing to pay for a company many believe lacks a sustainable business model.

“If they were willing to take $200 million to $300 million, I would buy it tomorrow,” a senior industry source told The Post.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch weighs up the pros:

YouTube is serving over 100 million videos per day, with 65,000 or so new videos uploaded daily. Things are going so well for YouTube that founder Chad Hurley was recently quoted as saying that they have no plans to sell and that an IPO would be “very exciting for us”.

There’s a potentially staggering amount of revenue that YouTube could generate off of those video views. While today advertising is fairly limited to banner advertising on the site, integration of advertising directly into videos is a significant opportunity.

The addition of a simple static or video add into each video that appears at the end (and exactly where viewers eyes are as the video ends) would be easy revenue (see how Revver does this as an example). With 100 million videos viewed per day, assuming 100% sell through (impossible, but useful for analysis) and a $1 CPM, YouTube would generate $100k per day in revenue. As the site grows, this revenue opportunity would grow as well.

And cons:

These 100 million daily video views aren’t people watching kittens fall asleep. Most of the popular videos on YouTube contain copyrighted material that YouTube shouldn’t be presenting in the first place. This isn’t just music videos and Saturday Night Live skits - if music is playing in the background while someone is dancing around, that’s still copyright infringement.

YouTube has some protection under U.S. law since they merely host this material posted by users. As long as they comply with the DMCA and take down copyrighted material promptly when requested, they are protected. That’s why you’ll often find your favorite bookmarked videos have vanished when you go back to the site.

YouTube has made significant efforts recently to reach out to copyright owners and has secured a couple of deals to mitigate the copyright issues they face.

YouTube is a phenomenon and has brilliantly exploited the gap in the market for a video sharing site (something which iFilm and Google Video have, so far, failed to do). But isn’t $1.5 billion asking a bit too much? Doesn’t this smack of the wacky hubris and irrational exuberance that caused the last dot com crash?

It has done very well up to this point but if it wants to become an eBay rather than a Priceline it still has to negotiate some significant hurdles. The main question is still: how can they monetise their vast user base without compromising the qualities that has made them so popular?

Maybe they have a big plan to do this but if a big media company snaps them up then I would guess rivals (who could also be failed bidders) would issue plenty of copyright lawsuits just to create problems. Added to that, if YouTube can grow so fast, so quickly, then who’s to say a cooler upstart won’t eat into their traffic sometime in the near future?

> Techcrunch on the YouTube valuation
> The New York Post with their take

On the Movie Cast this week we discuss the new cinema releases Clerks 2 and Trust the Man (I’ll review Children of Men at the weekend) whilst on DVD we take a look at Brick and Columbo: Season 4.

In the news we take a look at Apple’s proposed alliance with Google and our website of the week is Deadline Hollywood Daily.

> Download the Movie Cast from Creation Podcasts

The great Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist has passed away at the age of 83.

Mattias Karen of the AP reports:

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — Oscar-winning filmmaker Sven Nykvist, who was legendary director Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer of choice, died Wednesday after a long illness, his son said. He was 83.

Nykvist died at a nursing home where he was being treated for aphasia, a form of dementia, said his son, Carl-Gustaf Nykvist.

Nykvist won Academy Awards for best cinematography for the Bergman films “Cries and Whispers” in 1973 and “Fanny and Alexander” in 1982.

Nykvist’s sense of lighting and camera work made him a favorite of Bergman’s after their first collaboration on the 1954 movie “Sawdust and Tinsel,” which began a partnership that lasted nearly 30 years.

His work on films such as Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence and Persona added a rich mood and tone which was unmistakable and gave much of Bergman’s work its signature look and feel.

But perhaps the film that stands out most for me is Cries and Whispers. The striking use of colour (in stark contrast to the black and white of his earlier work with Bergman) stays with you long after that remarkable film has ended. It is still a film I would urge anyone to see.

Later in his career he worked with Bergman disciple Woody Allen on Crimes and Misdemeanors (arguably Allen’s last truly great film) and on Lasse Hallestrom’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?

But it is his collaborations with the Swedish maestro which he will be remembered for. As Gary Morris of the Bright Lights Film Journal has noted it was:

…one of the key collaborations in modern cinema.

Of that there can be no doubt.

> AP news report on the death of Sven Nykvist
> Sven Nykvist at the IMDb
> Wikipedia entry for Ingmar Bergman
> Article on Nykvist’s contribution to Bergman’s work at Ingmar Bergman Face to Face
> Peter Cowie’s essay on Cries and Whispers at the Criterion Collection
> Movie Masterworks on Persona

Gary Gentile of the AP reports that The Walt Disney Studio has sold 125,000 films via iTunes in one week:

The Walt Disney Co. has sold 125,000 digital copies of films through Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes store in less than a week, generating $1 million, Disney chief executive Robert Iger said Tuesday.

Disney expects revenue of $50 million in the first year from its iTunes partnership, Iger said at an investment conference in New York sponsored by Goldman Sachs.

“Clearly customers are saying to us they want content in multiple ways,” Iger said.

So far, Disney is the only studio selling films on iTunes. Disney was also the first studio to agree last year to sell television shows on iTunes. Other studios quickly followed suit.

The pressing question here is whether or not the big studios are ready to join the iTunes party. Christopher Campbell over at Cinematical thinks that they will as long as this isn’t just a blip:

I doubt that any more studios will announce a jump-on as soon as this week, but if the movies sell another million by this time next Tuesday, the rest of Hollywood should be quick to get in on the profits.

Clearly paid downloads via an established platform is the way forward but it will be interesting to see how it grows from this point, especially if rival studios sign up with different services.

> The AP story on iTunes & Disney
> Mike Snider of USA Today compares iTunes with rival Amazon Unbox
> Apple Insider with more on Apple’s multimedia plans

It seems Warner Music is going to license music videos on YouTube. TechCrunch reports:

YouTube and Warner Music Group Corp. will announce a deal Monday that will put thousands of Warner music videos on the video sharing site and allow user created videos to legally use Warner owned music.

YouTube is reported to have created technology that will automatically detect when copyrighted music is used in videos, give Warner the right to accept or reject those videos and will calculate the royalty fees Warner is owed.

Financial details haven’t been disclosed yet, but may include a cut of advertising revenue in exchange for licensing rights. It’s also unclear who will pay the royalty fees; that payment may come out of the advertising revenue or it may be demanded of the individual users who have put Warner music in their videos.

Could it be that start of a trend where TV shows and even movies are licensed out as well? Will a large media company reap the benefits of the massive YouTube user base? Or will they get cold feet when all sorts of unauthorised mash ups appear? It will be interesting to see how this works out.

> TechCrunch with the story
> MSNBC with their take

I was flicking through The Observer yesterday afternoon and my mind went back to an arts column I read two weeks ago in the same newspaper by Rachel Cooke, entitled “Who’s to judge? Better an eminent critic than a daft blogger”.

It was a lazy opinion piece about critics not being allowed to see The Wicker Man remake and how we should be suspicious about “daft bloggers” and trust more established print critics like David Denby of the New Yorker.

She also writes about a “battle” between old and new media:

It seems to me, though, that the real battle is not between studios and critics (Hollywood is about egos, so criticism will always have its place because its big names will always long for approval), but between critics and bloggers.

Which bloggers? Are we talking about Anne Thompson at The Hollywood Reporter? Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere? David Poland at Movie City News & The Hot Blog? All are well informed and publish a lot of great news and opinion on a daily basis. Plus, unlike Rachel at The Observer, they have things like email addresses and comment sections where readers can offer feedback.

I would also wager that these bloggers (and maybe even some of her readers) know a great deal more about the film business and would resent being referred to as “daft”. They far from the faceless stereotype put forward in her column.

She pursues her theme with a phrase so dusty it could have been cut and pasted from a chatroom circa 1997:

Thanks to the internet, everyone is a critic now, every opinion as valid as the next.

Is this really the case? Surely it is up to readers and the public to decide whose opinion is valid or not. Whilst the internet still provides us with some bad and lazy opinions it has overwhelmingly been a good thing for film reviews.

We can now read critics overseas like Roger Ebert, compare different reviews at sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes and (heaven forbid!) contribute our own opinions via blogs and message boards.

But wait, there is still more Rachel is upset about:

The general tone of the movie bloggers, who review with such liberated abandon, is: we have taste, too, and who are you to tell us that it is inferior to yours? Which is fair enough on one level. Some people like watching George Lucas films, and some don’t. But critics are not there to tell you what is right and wrong (though they might do along the way - alone in New York last weekend, David Denby’s potted reviews in the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town felt to me like a life raft); they do so much more than that, and it is dumb - and arrogant - of people to pretend otherwise.

Is there a “general tone” to “the movie bloggers”? To assess such a thing we would have to engage in a lengthy look at people who blog about movies, which I’m guessing would run into a lot of people. But she doesn’t name one blogger or cite one example to prove her point. To say they have a “general tone” is just a silly generalisation in itself.

Telling someone that you enjoyed something (or hated it) isn’t criticism; it’s conversation.

What is so wrong with conversation? Is she saying that print journalists or “established critics” should be immune to feedback or other opinions? This is all rather ironic as The Observer has two film critics I respect a great deal in Philip French and Mark Kermode.

Both have a deep knowledge of the world of film and manage to write intelligently about new cinema releases, issues in the world of film such as censorship and classic DVDs we should own. I value their take on films even when I don’t agree with it and I certainly don’t see them in “opposition” to opinions I read on blogs.

They are just part of my regular movie digest which can range from newspaper articles, radio shows, magazines, podcasts and “movie bloggers”. The Guardian and The Observer are two newspapers who generally have an intelligent and progressive approach to things like websites and blogs.

Some articles by Rachel do appear on The Observer Blog, like her piece on British libraries or a “shameless promotion” (their words!) of her interview with Tana Ramsay in the Observer Woman magazine.

But why not make all the articles (especially opinion pieces) incorporated into a website where people can leave opinions and debate the issue at hand instead of the rather unsatisfactory blog they have at the moment. Comment Is Free is clearly a bold step in that direction but it is separate from the main Guardian and Observer pieces.

Why not make the whole paper like that? If Rachel’s piece was posted in such an environment I’m sure she would find that all movie bloggers are not the same. She might even find that on some occasions an eminent blogger is better than a daft critic.

> Rachel Cooke’s original article
> Different movie reviews from a range of critics at Metacritic