Some words that have travelled past my eyes lately…
This Time | Benjamin T Jones
A republic has been on the national to-do list for over 160 years. Questions about it 'being the right time' are predictable but deceptively partisan: when places in a historical context, they are exposed as a delaying tactic. The republican moment will not fall into the lap of a nation that has nothing better to do that day. It must be seized.
This was a really easy read covering a brief (and under-appreciated) history of republicanism in Australia, from the goldfields of Eureka to the push leading up to the centenary of Federation in 2001, and beyond. Many great Australians fought peacefully to achieve their goal of making this country fully independent, all the while being overlooked for English elites. Why is the Queen still on our coins? Why do we still name streets after these people? Why do we reserve the highest position on our flag for the flag of a country which invaded our own and slaughtered our first inhabitants?
Jones gives his thoughts on the symbols and structures which could replace and build on what we have now. I was particularly fond of his proposed title for a head of state – Beanna Elder – which draws from Australia’s oldest culture.
I was sadly not old enough to vote at the 1999 referendum. There really is no argument for keeping a foreign hereditary head of state (even though some creepy royal sycophants still try their best). Australia is a country which values egalitarianism, meritocracy and community (more apparent to me after spending time overseas). The crown has been out place in our unique culture for some time now and I look forward to having a chance to rectify it, hopefully within the next ten decade.
The Big Picture | Ben Fritz
Are they still movies, though, if more than 99 percent of the people who watch them don't do so in a movie theatre? Who cares. Take out the commercial breaks and "previously on"s, and Breaking Bad is a forty-five-hour movie that's better than anything most movie studios have made this century. And no matter how many billions they earn at the box office, no one can convince me that the third Avengers offering and the fourth Captain America film aren't super-expensive episodes in the most successful television series of our era.
The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies was a great read. Fritz tracks the trends and events within the film and television world over the last twenty years. He uses information found in leaked emails from the Sony hack of 2014 as the bones of his book, which is fitting for the time period covered. Twenty years ago, Sony ruled the box office and Disney was languishing. In a very short time they switched places. One of these players saw the future and made it happen. Like many other products, movies became brands. An actor no longer gets bums on seats. A franchise does. A character does.
Why doesn’t Hollywood offer anything original any more? Simple – people just don’t pay to see original movies at the theatre like the once did. In the meantime the quality of television has increased exponentially. In many ways the two have switched places.
The lines have blurred between what defines a movie and what defines a television episode. This will blur further in the years to come. An episode of a series was once determined by the half-hour slots offered by a broadcast station, a movie limited by a film reel (and bladder capacity). There really isn’t a need for this any more, as is already being witnessed in a show like The Mandalorian, where an episode is “as long as it needs to be”. It’s no longer television or movies, but “content”.
Film content is also being driven by the money of an increasingly international market. Comedy doesn’t cross-cultures, so it doesn’t happen. There’s no Chinese money in American humour. On the flip side, services like Prime and Apple are emerging where profit is not a concern, so creativity can flourish with little concern to whether it finds an audience. The primary goal is to give users content to keep them within the larger tech ecosystem.
This book was only published in 2018, yet already feels out of date, such is the speed at which the movie world is changing. The pandemic has only exacerbated this. Some movies are being released to stream the same day at their theatrical release, and even the ones that aren’t are having their theatrical window shortened. It’s changing so quickly that the landscape will be unrecognisable in another few years.