Media

Rebecca Mead looks at how Serial changed the medium — opening floodgates of possibility, pressure, and money — and how some of that show’s successors have dealt with issues of narrative form and ethics.

“Long a staple of television, the technique has gained traction in recent years as an antidote to the kind of smash-cut film editing that first became popular in the ’90s before passing into cliché. But the execution of extreme close-ups requires a certain bravery on the part of actors: nary a blemish, a crow’s-foot wrinkle, or clogged pore will be spared the camera’s unblinking scrutiny.” Thank heaven for CGI.

Take Luis Fonsi’s hit song Despacito, whose music video set a worldwide record with 5.6 billion views. The video contains multiple copyrights, and YouTube has a number of licensing agreements in place to pay for rights to the video views. But uncertainty about whether YouTube has identified all the rights holders might lead the video sharing website to block this video, simply to avoid liability

To shoot Of Fathers and Sons, about a family of fighters with the Syrian Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front, Talal Derki (a Syrian Kurd)returned home from a safe exile in Berlin and convinced that family and its fellow extremists that he was sympathetic to their cause. Now that the film is out, he’s getting plenty of threats.

Production company Brave Bison, formerly known as Rightster, was awarded £1.8m to deliver the multi-channel network (MCN) for the arts in 2014. It was launched in September 2015, aiming to make arts content more discoverable and engaging to audiences, increase the number and range of people engaging with arts online and offline, develop both the skills and digital capacity of the arts sector, and build the volume of creative media.

What does it mean that Los Angeles, home to Hollywood and the American film industry itself, has lost what was once its most important festival? And what is it about the city that proves so inhospitable to such events?

On the one side, German Playboy and its interview with Morricone. On the other, Morricone, who says he didn’t even give German Playboy an interview. What the heck is going on?

And it’s only going to lead to a lot more BitTorrenting, which isn’t legal, but is available. “The site is loaded with stuff that is, quite simply, not available on disc, and not streaming anywhere else. It’s the only way you can see Ernst Lubitsch’s Cluny Brown, Michael Powell’s The Spy in Black, Yasujirô Ozu’s An Inn in Tokyo, and dozens more.”

The owners of Aardman don’t want anyone (ahem, perhaps a large company that starts with a D) to take over the UK’s largest animation company, so they’re handing over 75 percent of the company to its 140 employees and 180 freelancers. Why? “We always believed that independence was our strong suit. We didn’t have to dance to anybody else’s tune and could make our own decisions.”

Filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu wanted to make work that showed Africans falling in love. “Americans were falling in love and Europeans were falling in love, … but Africans, we were never falling in love. The first time I saw an African couple even hold hands on screen, I was 16.”

Will Disney invest in a lot of international content for Hulu to meet, for instance, European regulations? And will this mean a hit to Netflix’s domination of the international market?

There will be plenty of popular movies in the Oscars this year. Probably.

The “town” on the ranch was likely completely destroyed. “The ranch, which until Friday resembled a town straight out of a western, was originally developed in 1927, when Paramount Pictures purchased the lot in the old Rancho Las Virgenes and used it for various films, including The Maid of Salem (1937) and The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938). In the 1950s, Paramount sold the lot to William Hertz, who built the permanent western town that would serve many shoots and as a tourist destination.”

The announcement from the New York City PBS station says that the channel’s programming “will illuminate the emerging to the established, the hybrid to the pure in dance, film, stories, music, theater, visual art, design and all other forms of creative expression.” A beta version of All Arts is currently online at allarts.wliw.org; the full version is scheduled to launch on January 28.

It’s the first time AT&T has discontinued customer service over piracy allegations since having shaped its own piracy policies last year, which is significant given it just became one of America’s major media companies.

“In these fifty years, let’s face it, we have been completely overrun. Zombies are everywhere. They are in our movies, tv shows, books, and comic books, plus, out here in the real world where the Center for Disease Control has a comprehensive Zombie preparedness and education plan and there are Zombie-walks, Zombie-conventions, and, anyway, didn’t you see them this Halloween?” Tim Sommers considers the nature of Zombies’ appeal.

“[The Amazon drama] Homecoming is just one of a raft of exceptionally good new half-hour dramas. Netflix has Maniac, Amazon also has Forever, and even Facebook has Sorry For Your Loss. Each of these shows have the traditional trappings of an hourlong, and yet they’re shorter and punchier and all the better for it. They’re necessary, too. In an age where we’re being slowly suffocated with a tower of content that nobody can fully keep on top of, a half-hour drama simplifies things.”

Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves announced on Twitter that his organization would be “taking legal action” against Netflix and the producers of the series The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina for “appropriating” the Temple’s copyrighted image of the occult figure Baphomet, a “central icon” of the faith.

The horror of the Great War consumed the lives of soldiers and civilians alike; it sought them out in their sleep, their imagination, and, bizarrely, in their entertainments. The “horror film” had existed almost from the time of the invention of the motion picture itself in the late 19th century. But a new kind of terror film manifested in the years following the Great War.

While we wait for the next AI-generated work to hit the block, there’s a lot more to learn. To find out about the interesting work being created with machine learning—and the complex boundaries it’s pushing—we’ve assembled a list of nine pioneering artists to watch.

“[Spacey’s scandal] was a ‘gut punch,’ [co-showrunner Frank] Pugliese said, but the prospect of tossing out five months of work and having to rebuild the season without the show’s corrupt central figure actually emboldened him and his partner. ‘It felt so unfair to the story, in a way, we had to defend the world of the show,’ [co-showrunner Melissa James] Gibson said.” Here’s how they pulled it off.