"Netflix storms the Emmy Nominations, but How Much Has Really Changed?" By Linda Holmes, for NPR's "Monkey See" blog. Vulture's Josef Adalian concurs, and thinks Emmy voters were "starstruck" to show House of Cards so much love. At the Tampa Bay Times, Eric Deggans disagrees and argues that quite a bit has changed, actually. See also: Alan Sepinwall's rundown; also at Vulture, RogerEbert.com editor Matt Zoller Seitz offers an alternate list of Dramas and Comedies, and lists his most and least favorite nods. For a complete list of 2013 Emmy nominations, click here.
"Save the Movie! The 2005 Screenwriting Book That's Taken Over Hollywood—and Made Every Movie Feel the Same." By Peter Suderman, for Slate.
"Summer movies are often described as formulaic. But what few people know is that there is actually a formula—one that lays out, on a page-by-page basis, exactly what should happen when in a screenplay. It’s as if a mad scientist has discovered a secret process for making a perfect, or at least perfectly conventional, summer blockbuster. The formula didn’t come from a mad scientist. Instead it came from a screenplay guidebook, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. In the book, author Blake Snyder, a successful spec screenwriter who became an influential screenplay guru, preaches a variant on the basic three-act structure that has dominated blockbuster filmmaking since the late 1970s."
"The Forgotten Blockbuster 'The Golden Child' Marks the Beginning of Eddie Murphy's 'Not Trying' Phase." At The Dissolve, Nathan Rabin inaugurates a new regular feature looking at hugely successful movies that seem to have left no impression on the culture as a whole. "Reduced to its bare outlines, The Golden Child in some ways resembles Ghostbusters, which came out just two years earlier: Take a popular Saturday Night Live alum (or alumni, in Ghostbusters’case); put him in a special-effects-heavy, kid-friendly fantastical adventure; then wait for the bucks to roll in. Murphy was even eyed for the role Ernie Hudson ended up playing in Ghostbusters, but at that point, Murphy was much too big to be playing “the black guy” in anyone else’s movie, even one as big as Ghostbusters. (His Beverly Hills Cop outgrossed Ghostbusters that same year.) Instead, Murphy played a role in The Golden Child originally intended for Mel Gibson. When Murphy took the part, the film was hastily converted from a relatively straight action-adventure epic to a comedy, though the film shifted genres in pre-production without becoming funny in the process."
From the blog "What Netflix Does," which is dedicated to preserving evidence that Netflix crops a good many of its movies, sometimes awkwardly. For the corporate explanation of why this happens, read "Don't Crop Me, Bro! Netflix Says It Doesn't Crop Movies." By Tom Cheredar for VentureBeat.
Siskel and Ebert discuss the state of home video in 1988. Part 1 of 3 YouTube videos. This program includes a spirited defense of letterboxing, which was unpopular at the time.