Celluloid Meets Cybertech

By Bill Fick

Now that the Oscar nominations are out, you can learn more than you ever wanted to know about the history of the Academy Awards, this year’s nominees and also count down the days to the big event at the Motion Picture Academy’s official website, http://www.oscar.com.

While the site is attractive and mildly interesting, it reeks of commercial sponsorship. For instance, to enter an on-line drawing for a trip to LA during Oscar season 1998, you have to use Microsoft Internet Explorer -- no other browsers allowed. And ironically, the grand prize only gets you a good seat at the Parade of Stars. Wouldn’t you have thought that Bill Gates and Hollywood could splurge for a pair of tickets to the awards ceremony itself?

I guess that is the essence of Tinseltown: it should appeal to the masses yet remain a very exclusive club. Some of the major studios have teamed up to present their own virtual vision of Hollywood at http://www.hollywood.com. It offers a good selection of pictures, video clips, music and soundbites from recent movies, as well as a large on-line store with a wealth of licensed movie and studio t-shirts, mugs, toys and other merchandise.

On-line retail sales are of course secondary to the film industry’s embrace of the Web as a marketing tool in publicity drives for new releases. Just about any new film released today has its own website, even remakes such as http://www.starwars.com. Individual movie sites tend to be flashy and well designed — Hollywood spares no expense -- but also full of gimmicks and short-lived, quickly deactivated once the movie’s run has ended.

A new and more creative commercial film resource recently came online at http://www.reel.com. Its "Reel Genius" service builds a profile of your film tastes based on ratings of 10 or more movies you have seen and then will try to recommend other films across specific genres which it concludes you might enjoy. You can also search for films based on genre, year of release, or the ratings from well-known critics and then look at the "anatomy" of each film, or the percent content of various elements such as "sex" or "special effects".

Finally a "Film Thesaurus" will help to find films that are analogous or synonymous with each other in terms of a quality the site’s editors describe as "energy level". The associations here are fun to play with and explore. In a conspiratorial mood, I learned that "All the President’s Men" is on a par with "Nixon", "The China Syndrome", and "The Conversation". On the lighter side, the thesaurus judged Woody Allen’s "Annie Hall" synonymous with "When Harry Met Sally," "Manhattan", and "Hannah and her Sisters".

It isn’t too hard to guess where all of these games are leading: as you play and explore you develop a sophisticated "customer profile" which Reel can use to offer other films to you for purchase on-line. For now, however, Reel’s on-line store is still under construction, so you can play unmolested.

If, on the other hand, you are tired of dubbed pirate videos from your local kiosk and you really want to buy quality videos, you should visit http://www.videoflicks.com, a Toronto, Canada video store which has grown well beyond its neighborhood with the help of the Internet. The site’s design is modest, perhaps even a bit tacky, but you can find the film you seek easily, place an order, and receive your NTSC-standard tape by mail or express package in a few days.

If you don’t know what to order, you should first spend some time going through an excellent independent compendium of film criticism at http://www.film.com. In addition to an extensive collection of reviews from a wide variety of media, visitors to the site can contribute their own commentary on-line, which gradually builds a trail of grassroots debate in the wake of each film listed.

For pure, unadulterated information and minutiae about movies, nothing can compare with the Internet Move Database at http://us.imdb.com. This resource contains millions of pieces of information dating to the beginning of the film era searchable by any parameter. In other words, you can get a complete listing of every film shot by an obscure director of photography who died in 1950, or simply find out how Sophia Loren began her career.

Russian film resources are decidedly more limited and I haven’t yet discovered an online video store here, but you can find an aspiring database and collection of Russian film journals and articles at http://win.russia.agama.com/r-club/cinema. An on-line version of the "Isskustvo Kino" journal is available here, as well as interesting statistics and trivia, such as the fact that the first cinema hall in Russia opened in 1907. The database contains basic reference information about every Russian and Soviet film ever released.

The Institute for Kino-Photo Documents is also in the process of mounting film databases online at http://194.190.135.34. This numeric address is a temporary inconvenience, according to the Institute, because the Russian Internet registry has thus far proven reluctant to register their desired domain name: "cinema.ru", perhaps fearing that others might want it as well.

It’s clear from the pulsating spheres that clutter the screen that novice webmasters are at work, but the information content promises to be unique. The first database, already functional, is entitled "Legal Cinema", and contains licensing information about individual films and distributor companies. The hope is that wider access to this information might eventually help to combat piracy since in many instances there is simply no way to ascertain whether a wholesale distributor is legitimate or not.

Someday, the opportunities for video piracy may surpass our wildest imagination if distribution of entire films over the Internet becomes technically feasible. Right now, of course, limited network speed and bandwidth make timely transmission of an entire film impractical. However, just last week a new technology called "Real Video" (http://www.real.com) was introduced which allows real-time streaming transmission of sound and video at data speeds of just 28.8 kilobits per second, attainable by an ordinary modem and phone line.

You can try out the technology with free viewer software and use it to watch C-Span (http://www.cspan.org) and FoxNews (http://www.foxnews.com), which are offering experimental broadcasts in the RealVideo format. The quality is hardly cinematic at this point, but it really makes one wonder what will happen to our present notions of "cinema" and "broadcasting" just a few years down the road.