“BBC director general Tony Hall has unveiled plans to allow the Corporation’s in-house production teams to make content for rival broadcasters, as part of a shake-up he has described as a ‘competition revolution’.”
Here’s the complete list of Emmy nominees for 2014.
“Tablets have become as mundane as the PCs whose decline they hastened. Instead of radical hardware innovations, the maxed-out market is racing toward as many screen sizes as shoe sizes.”
On the last day of 2020, Anders Weberg will release Ambiancé, which is, he says, “an abstract nonlinear narrative summary of the artist’s time spent with the moving image.” The film will “be shown in its full length on a single occasion syncronised in all the continents of the world and then destroyed.” (includes trailer)
“The romantic comedy has created, on top of everything else, a new genre: the obituary for the romantic comedy. … Because the truth is that [today's] romantic comedies are, as works of art and pieces of culture, terrible. They are usually some ungodly, unseemly, unsexy combination of: stale, trite, silly, and formulaic.”
“What actually gets people moving? Do grant-supported media projects incite change, or are they simply an expensive way of preaching to the choir? Ultimately, the answers may help determine which projects get financed, which formats are favored and how stories are structured.”
It stopped being fun. It just stopped being fun. It really wasn’t. That’s a big deal to me. It may sound like “Why do you have to have fun to go to work?” I don’t know. I like to be in a good mood. The ratio of bullshit to the fun part of doing the work was really starting to get out of whack.
“A movie’s Friday matinees would determine whether it even gets an evening screening, or whether the projector switches back to last week’s blockbuster. … This bleak future is the direction the industry is pointed in, but even if it arrives it will not last. Once movies can no longer be defined by technology, you unmask powerful fundamentals – the timelessness, the otherworldliness, the shared experience of these narratives.”
On the Media‘s Bob Garfield talks with Daniel Alarcón (whom you might as well think of, for now, as the Latino Ira Glass) about his Spanish-language series, Radio Ambulante. (audio)
“Their crude variables and simplistic results reflect a larger problem video game research continues to face as it grows, one that makes rigorous experiments hard to recognize: Scientists don’t even know how video games’ real-world effects should be measured.”
“The emerging world enthusiasm for Hollywood films does not extend to comedies, or at least not relative to its love of action movies and animated films. In China, for example, U.S. comedies account for only 10% of box office spending, compared to 25% in the U.S.”
“In recent years, adult television viewers have reveled in an overflow of quality programs that critics have called a new golden age. So why shouldn’t preschoolers be equally spoiled?”
“I understand that the black audience is not monolithic. There are many different types of films that black people want and I’ve never had a feeling that all my films would appeal to all black people. Never, ever, ever.”
“Interactive fiction, which once went by the name ‘text adventure,’ is having a moment.”
Ignore (or listen to, should you prefer) the specific movie recommendations in this piece, but revel in the knowledge of boutique streaming options that can fill up the empty hours until Season 3 of Orange Is the New Black drops.
“Not only was it an astute embodiment of the phenomenon we might call ‘Beatletime’ – frantic, fractured, breathless and intoxicating – it was born of speed itself. To be ready when the lights went down for the command performance before Princess Margaret in London in July, 1964, the movie had to be shot and completed in only four months.”
“The glory days are back in the nation’s film heartlands. Buoyant, expanding and home to some of the world’s biggest stars, the leading studios are full to capacity and taking unprecedented bookings from international film-makers.”
“At the very least, the worst movies ever made offer some comfort: Even in absolute disaster, there’s something to be learned about why we make entertainment, and how it can go wrong. Occasionally, the failure even succeeds, albeit on a different rubric than the one it originally had in mind.”
Michael Bay’s fourth Transformers installment racked up $134.5 million in its first five days in China, which is higher than the $121 million it had earned in North American theaters by July 1. – See more at:
“We actually make more money per viewer streaming than we do on television. If you stream our programming online, you’re seeing a full complement of advertising—you can’t bypass it.”
“Gone are a distributor’s financial guarantees, which in the case of This American Life, reached seven figures. Instead, Mr. Glass will now be responsible for the show’s marketing and distribution, as well as for finding corporate sponsors. It’s the equivalent of Radiohead’s releasing its own album … or Louis C. K.’s selling his own stand-up special – except all the time, for every show.”
Neil Genzlinger: “That television will kill you isn’t particularly new … But this critic, at least, has stopped paying attention to any report that begins, ‘A new study finds that watching television could …’ He has done so because there are so many of them, and they have sent confusing, sometimes contradictory messages.”
“Because 88 percent of Americans learn about health issues from television,” says CDC public affairs director Barbara Reynolds, “[the] CDC recognizes that primetime and daytime television programming are rich and productive channels for disseminating public-health messages.”
“Heading into summer, overall box office was actually up roughly 9%, compared with 2013. But since early May, the wind has gone out of Hollywood’s sails, and that healthy head start has been wiped away. With the summer season typically making up as much as 40% of the studios’ overall annual revenue, the recent box office swoon has been worrying for the industry, though perhaps not panic-inducing.”
“I’m tired of fearing that I’m easily replaceable and I’m tired of hearing that this is industry standard. These companies abuse us, they don’t take our concerns seriously, they are taking our wages from us, not providing us with health care or vacation time. These benefits would be provided to any other full time worker and here we are working more than full time.”
“On screens across Asia, it’s not terribly uncommon to see commercials or soap operas that display milk-skinned actors painted brown. Sometimes they try to depict a character with African ancestry. Sometimes they intend to show an Asian bumpkin from the countryside” – or a Filipino guest worker.
“The increase of 22% is a shade less than the 27% full year gain made last year when annual B.O. rose to $3.6 billion, though the first half has regularly been slower than the second semester.”
Dave Isay: “We’ll make a comprehensive effort to find people who were alive in the pre-Stonewall era – in the ’50s and ’60s in small towns all across the country, creating a record of what life was like for them. I think it is going to be very difficult to hear. It’s difficult now; then, it was probably difficult beyond our imagination. You know, it was a spiritual holocaust.”
Noah Berlatsky: “Female prisoners on the show are treated very differently. They may be violent and may be queer, but they are, for the most part, presented as sympathetic. This seems like a feminist move, on the surface. But the inability to extend that sympathy to male inmates, raises a disturbing possibility: that the show is condescending to women while reinforcing old and destructive attitudes about men.”
“Directors have frequently used imagery from painting and other art forms to shape the look and meaning of their works.”