BilmBlog500

For over 30 years, I have been a devout reader of Variety. Now, I hate the actual printed magazine.  It doesn't take long to read, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes in a good week.  And this quick read comes in the form of an oversize magazine printed on heavy coated white paper.   Who wants to go around on the subway holding a heavy, oversized magazine that doesn't take very long to read and which requires lots and lots of page turns?  The magazine is as annoying as it is informative. However, the printed magazine is now only a small portion of the total content Variety offers.  Every week there are dozens of articles and reviews and columnists to be found on the magazine's website that aren't to be found in the weekly magazine. There is no paywall on the website.  The owner of Variety has made a business decision not to charge for its content. I prefer content like this in print. There are week-long stretches when I have plenty of time to sit at my computer...

There's nothing like the internet to make me feel obsolete sometimes. As an example, I used to plan to see movies on opening weekend.  There would be an ad in the Sunday paper or in the Village Voice on Wednesday telling me that a movie was opening on Friday.  It might even have told me which theater it was opening at.  I'd have days to anticipate going to the Astor Plaza or the Ziegfeld or some other particularly nice theatre.  Now, maybe, I'll check the NY Times home page on Thursday night and there will be reviews of movies opening the next day, and I'll finally know what's opening.  Many of the movies won't even have ads in the paper on the day they open, or they'll have ads without theatre listings.  If it weren't for the movie clocks in newspapers, the only damned way I'd know where to see a movie would be to scroll through 12 pages of listings, two theatres or three theatres to a page, on the internet.  It would almost make me not want to go t...

So I haven't done a post on the newspaper business in a while... Two things in Tuesday's NY Times that got me to wanting to climb on the soapbox. First, there's an actual bona fide full-color full-page ad for The Hurt Locker in the arts section. Years ago, right after the Golden Globes you could see the difference between the early edition and late edition NY Times, as all the film studios took out placeholder ads for all of their movies, and then would quickly swap in something more appropriate for the late edition to tout their winners. Same thing after Oscar nominations were announced, or after the Oscars themselves. Film ads in the Times have been steadily declining for years and years now, to the point where it's an actual surprising thing to see studios actually taking ads in size or quantity. And in fact, that rather "wow, what's that doing here" ad for The Hurt Locker today was the only film ad in the NY Times for any of the Oscar-winning movie...