Film Discourse on the Praised and Acclaimed: Reviewing Criteria in the United States and United Kingdom

This research examines the aesthetic elements of contemporary film criticism. Although a restricted field of film production has arisen beside the large-scale field, including an elite critical discourse, the film industry remains relentlessly oriented to its goal of producing commercial products that achieve widespread popular appeal. This differentiation becomes apparent in the types of films validated by publics, peers, and critics. Our exploratory analysis examines whether the dichotomy of artistic versus popular forms of criticism still captures the complexity of films produced under conditions of increased commercialization, globalization, and digitization. We analyzed reviews published in newspapers of record in the United Kingdom and United States of films released in 2007 that received the utmost popular, professional, and critical recognition. Findings reveal that contemporary film criticism incorporates aesthetic elements drawn from popular interests as well as elite art considerations, thereby complicating crit

From 'Neighbours' to 'Packed to the Rafters': Accounting for longevity in the evolution of Aussie soaps

If there is one television programming staple for which Australian television drama is known internationally, it is the long-running television soap, with Neighbours (originally produced by Grundy in 1985) lauded as 'the most outstanding example of Australian series export' (Cunningham and Jacka, 1996). Twenty-five years on, this program still airs on domestic and international TV schedules five days a week, despite waning popularity with local Australian audiences. Considering past interest in the success and longevity of this soap, it is apposite to look again at the continuing progress of Neighbours foremost as a global brand. In comparison, Packed to the Rafters is treated here as a contemporary version of familiar Aussie themes related to everyday middle-class suburbia, populated with blue skies and feel-good characters expressing wholesome family values, but with a stylistic innovation defined here as domestic realism. As part of the production ecology of the late 2000s, Packed to the Rafters demonstrates the considerable role for local drama productions as loss leaders and flagship programming for commercial free-to-air networks up against an increasingly difficult domestic market

The Mediation is the Message. Italian Regionalization of US TV Series as Co-creational Work

The article focuses on the co-creational labour made by professionals (and non-professionals) who, in a non-Anglo-Saxon country such as Italy, adapt and modify (heavily or slightly) the \u2018original\u2019 media products (i.e. TV series) in order to make them accessible to the domestic audience. After a concise introduction on the \u2018Italianization\u2019 process, the article proceeds to describe two ways of adapting nationally: the professional translation and dubbing system and the grassroots fansubbing phenomenon. The attention is both on the production routines and on their influence on the meaning of the text

The evaluation of popular music in the United States, Germany and the Netherlands: a comparison of the use of high art and popular aesthetic criteria

Popular music has apparently gained much in status and artistic legitimacy. Some have argued that popular music criticism has assimilated the evaluative criteria traditionally associated with high art aesthetics to legitimate pop music as a serious art form, while others have claimed that popular music discourse opposes the evaluative principles of high art worlds in favor of a ‘popular aesthetic’. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Lamont, DiMaggio and Bourdieu, we compare the critical discourse on popular music in the United States, Germany and the Netherlands and expect that the presence of ‘high art’ and ‘popular’ aesthetic criteria in popular music reviews published in elite newspapers varies cross-nationally due to differences in the hierarchy, universality and boundary strength of their respective cultural classification systems. We compare the prevalence of various high art and popular evaluative criteria in popular music album reviews in American, Dutch, and German newspapers. In the US, the boundary between high art and popular aesthetics appears to be weakest, German reviewers take the most high art approach to popular music, while Dutch reviews clearly favor the popular aesthetic over high art criteria