Hope Lies on Television #17 - The Future(?)

The year is still relatively young, and with Spring rapidly approaching there is no better time to look to the future. With that in mind, this edition of Hope Lies on Television focuses on the release of House of Cards, the David Fincher-produced remake of the classic British series, and the question of whether its unique distribution method represents a viable future for television. I'm a little skeptical of the potential, though most of that comes from the quality of the series itself, rather than solely from the system that created it.

Film Review: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy has proven to be that rarest of things, a literary blockbuster in an age when book sales seem to be perpetually in an irreversible tailspin. Not only that, but they have succeeded despite incredibly dark and violent subject matter, particularly aimed against women, which seems like it might render the stories unpalatable to a mainstream audience. Yet the success of the books - no doubt driven in part by the mystique cultivated around Larsson's death from a heart attack at the age of 50 - speaks for itself, as does the staggering success of the trilogy of Swedish television films based on the books which were released worldwide in 2010, to considerable acclaim. (For the record, I thought they were pretty unspectacular, though I liked the books well enough.)

Oscar Predictions: The Technical Awards

Welcome once again to A Mighty Fine Blog's Oscar prediction special! Much like the ceremony itself, it promises to be overlong, sporadically interesting and ultimately futile. On the plus side, there will be no interpretative dance sequences or mawkish tributes to people you've never heard of, and it won't take you five hours to read. (Though it may take me that fucking long to write.)

As with last year, I will split the predictions into two posts; one for the Technical Awards and one for the Main Awards. This is intended to make them easier to digest, so that you, the reader, won't have to read through one mammoth post, but it also means that if you don't care about Best Cinematography you can just look at the other post and see who is going to win the awards that most people care about.

So, unfunny introduction down, let's delve into the Academy Awards, 2011, and try to make some sense of them.