In the first, Anne Billson admits that while the critics may be lining up to pan the latest Twilight film, it does seem to be a harbinger of the rise of films with women in the lead for a change.

In the second, Issy Sampson provides a run down of some of the upcoming movies to feature female leads and seems to like the fact that they aren’t rom-coms, but rather more action movies. I’d have to say that Haywire appears to tread a well-worn path of the female assassin (only avoiding the usual cheese by the looks of it), but the others definitely look to provide some great stories and unique twists as well.

“I think 3D is right smack in the middle of its terrible twos. We have disappointed our audience multiple times now, and because of that I think there is genuine distrust – whereas a year and a half ago, there was genuine excitement, enthusiasm and reward for the first group of 3D films that actually delivered a quality experience. Now that’s been seriously undermined.”

“The audience has spoken, and they have spoken really loudly.”

This comes in light of the fact that “more US filmgoers have been choosing to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean and Kung Fu Panda films in 2D.”

That’s not because of bad 3D experiences, it’s because of 3D experiences in general. I’ve long been putting the case against 3D and there’s doubt we’re even able to process it. I actively look for 2D showings of the films I want to see and will continue to do so.

We’ll see what the rest of the audience thinks with the release of the new Transformers film though, which is supposed to have top-draw 3D. I still don’t think it’s worth it and, while it’ll be a hit, it’ll be interesting to see if they can actually manage a story as well.

As much as I like the idea of two sets of kids playing pirates on a lake in a twee Enid Blyton style (or indeed, an Arthur Ransome style) — I’ve seen one of the older films — and that it’ll have global appeal, you’re going to have difficulty beating something with a massive in-built market, wizards and special effects coming out of the wazoo.

Still, should be cheaper to shoot and should convey England globally as well, not to mention helping tourism for all those foreigners who want strawberries and cream and lashings of ginger beer in the summer sun.

I don’t know what the uptake is like for digital at the moment, but I think it’s still fairly low, even in western countries, so getting the cinemas to move to yet another expensive format isn’t going to happen. Digital has all sort of benefits, from cost savings to security, largely for the distributors, but they haven’t been fast to come forward and stick most of their hands in their pockets to help cinemas. It’s taken some other initiatives and things like 3D (with higher ticket prices) to drive the adoption.

If you believe Wikipedia, there were about 36,000 digital screens worldwide in June 2010, while there were 38,000 screens in North America alone (as of December 2009).

So it’ll be a long time before 49fps is adopted, and even then only if the cinemas see a real benefit to the bottom line. That’s tackling cinemas though, but as one (falling) medium in the film chain, what about home users?

TV sets, DVD/Blu-ray players, HDMI interfaces, graphics cards, computers, mobiles, tablets, none of them are setup for 48fps, they’re all locked to 24fps. As we’ve seen with Blu-ray, unless there’s a good reason to move, home users will stay put with ‘good enough’ technology. It would take decades for them to update.

It’s a bit like James Cameron coming out and saying he expected all movies to be made in 3D within the next five years. No, they won’t. I haven’t yet seen a film that is better for it, in fact most are spoilt by 3D, it’s used purely to drive up ticket prices as far as I can see. A good film is a good film regardless of the format. That’s before you consider the uptake for home users is tiny. We don’t want it. I think it’ll last longer than it did the last time around (in the 40s, 50s and 60s when studios tried to fight TV with everything from colour to Aroma-Rama and Smell-O-Vision).

I’m not against new technologies, but they have to bring something to the medium other than a gimmick and a rise in ticket prices.

Update: Looks like the majority of people agree with me on the 3D front, The Guardian has a poll about whether Cameron’s ’3D future’ is glorious or dystopian, currently it stands at 81% of people saying dystopian (as of 19:55 BST 18/4/2011).

That’s the trouble with this game. Anyone can play. If you want to fuel your theory with your own prejudices, who’s to prove you wrong? There’s not even much point in asking cinemagoers, since many theories will assume subconscious responses which their owners might not own up to even if they were aware of them.

Give David Cox some credit, he’s managed to sum up the whole of film theory in one paragraph in his article about why The King’s Speech is so popular.

That was always my argument on my film course, what you read in a scene/film is not what I read, and almost certainly not what the writer/director/whoever intended, almost to the point of making it not worth speculating. Not that I think studying it is a bad idea, I just think pontificating as if it were fact, is wrong.

Now, I haven’t been a fan of the UKFC, in part because they seem to claim a lot of success for films that I don’t consider British.

Yes, they did help fund The King’s Speech, but of the £15m budget, they supplied £1m.  I daresay that could have been raised from the other sources (which were The Weinstein Company, a US production company; Momentum Pictures, a UK distribution company, owned by a Canadian company; the Aegis Film Fund, a private UK film financing fund; Molinare, a UK production company/facility and FilmNation Entertainment, a US film sales company).

Once they had Colin Firth, Helena Bonham-Carter or Jeffrey Rush attached I think the funding would have taken care of itself.

What’s interesting is that The King’s Speech has done so well, but is again, another quintessentially British film, which is to say a period drama, the only genre we seem to be able to make which is successful globally.

I agree with Gurinder Chadha that British film should reflect British tastes, styles and attitudes and use those films to provide a window for the world to see.  At the moment we only seem to produce hits about eras long since gone.  Where are the modern stories that are making a splash outside the UK?

So to say it has revived the British film industry is a bit rich.  We’ve been producing global hits like this on-and-off for years.  What we need is to do it more consistently.  There’s also this notion that it was an independent film which makes it a greater success.

Realistically, all of the Oscar contenders this year were independents.  Hollywood isn’t in the business of making critically acclaimed films, it makes money, which is why one in five films released this year will be a sequel, prequel or spin-off.  The King’s Speech itself was an adaptation, not original material (albeit written by the same man).  So to keep looking at Hollywood and wishing that’s what we had is wrong, do you think it’s easier to make an independent movie in the US?  It isn’t.

What the success of the film shows is that aside from having a thriving technical industry, sort out the world over and heavily relied on by Hollywood, we also have a good creative industry, but like all the other film industries, it takes perseverance to succeed.

This wasn’t a film that succeeded because of the UKFC, it is a film that would have succeeded anyway and would have managed to raise that extra finance somewhere.  This is the sort of budget UK films should be shooting with because it’s a figure we can raise on our own and can be sustainable with profits made in the UK alone if necessary (i.e. if no one else ‘gets’ it).  I hope the success will mean we’ll see more film investment from private sources, rather than everyone bemoaning the loss of a lottery handout.

If movie financing is something that interests you I recommend giving The Big Picture by Edward Jay Epstein a go.

I don’t like 3D either, it’s terrible for the movie experience and the sooner it’s gone the better, maybe there is a biological reason we can’t handle it, but I’m not sure that’s going to stop studios putting out 3D movies.

The only other alternative is iTunes, which wraps its movies in DRM and doesn’t offer them in full HD. Admittedly, we still need BT to get rolling out their new and improved 21CN (21st Century Network) so we make use of fibre, but one step at a time.