Media

Ernie Smith offers a brief history of these law-enforcement teaching tools – “where they came from, how they inspired technology’s evolution, and their impact on fighting crime.”

Follow JC Go “is based on the hugely popular Pokémon-catching game. But instead of collecting as many Pokémon as possible, players must try and find saints, biblical characters, and other religious figures to add to their Evangelization Team, known as an eTeam, and complete in-game challenges. Similar to Pokémon Go, Follow JC Go uses GPS to detect a user’s location in the city.”

“Last weekend in downtown Los Angeles, [Lynch and] Showtime previewed [the] first Twin Peaks VR experience, which will be available for fans to buy on Steam for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift sometime in 2019. … However, the full experience will eventually be a one-hour production created by Showtime and Collider, with guidance from Lynch himself.”

The push to create rivals to stunt the growth of Netflix has become a global phenomenon, as the streamer is now available in 190 countries and is poised to consistently make more money in the future abroad than in the U.S.

The service, which may exist as a standalone app or within the existing TV app, will launch in the US first and become available in more than 100 countries after a few months of availability, the report says. It will feature a mix of original programming, access to third-party services, and the ability to subscribe directly to channel packages offered by network and cable providers, similar to Amazon’s Channels feature.

Nearly every company that makes video is finding its way into the streaming media business. Disney is planning its own Netflix competitor for 2019, backed by content holdings like Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Pixar. AT&T plans to launch its own Time-Warner focused equivalent around the same time. Similar competitors from Amazon and Comcast are already taking shape. With the streaming subscription business growing this fast, everyone wants a piece — and they’re ready to fight for it.

“The proposal will force platforms, like YouTube, to prioritize content from a small number of large companies. The burden of copyright proof will be too high for most independent creators to instantly demonstrate. There is a better way forward for copyright online but it’s critical you speak up now as this decision may be finalized by the end of the year.”

“You want to honour the victims, but you also want to provide a thrilling night at the movies. Maybe there is no way of squaring that circle.” Steve Rose considers the two new films about the 2011 mass murders by a white nationalist terrorist in Norway.

Six years of shooting in dozens of locations, famous film auteurs playing versions of themselves, the cast and crew posing as film students to get a cheap rental rate for the MGM backlot (they smuggled Welles in a van), half a dozen or so different kinds of film stock — and that’s only the beginning of the story.

OK, it’s not actually super-secret, and it’s not a vault – it’s the Walt Disney Animation Research Library, “a silent, temperature-controlled labyrinth that underlines Disney’s zealous protection of its past and huge ambitions for its future.”

A new study from USC Annenberg says that “immigrant characters on television are still underrepresented and largely one-dimensional.”

Maybe! “The U.S. box office has made roughly $9.3 billion in 2018 so far, nearly a 9% increase from last year.” (And it’s not all from Black Panther.)

Low-budget horror movies have made Blumhouse an awful lot of money. Can its film formula work in a much more crowded TV market? If they do, it won’t be because of jump scares. “Blumhouse executives explained that only 20 percent of the studio’s television projects will be traditional horror fare.”

It’s all thanks to a cab driver from the Bronx, who drove Muppeteer Carol Spinney to his first meeting with Jim Henson.

The makers of Making a Murderer created a second series, but a fair amount of it is about what changed after their documentary series exploded onto Netflix in 2015.

She’s ready for films to change, a lot. “Davis says she wants to play the sort of roles Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep have had. ‘I would love to have a black female Klute, or Kramer, or Unmarried Woman, or Annie Hall. But who’s gonna write it, who’s gonna produce it, who’s gonna see it, again and again and again?'”

The Grand Duchess Maria of Russia, great-great-granddaughter of Czar Nicholas II (she lives in Spain) isn’t impressed, or so said her people. “The chancellery would not have issued the release at all if The Romanoffs were simply dull, the release went on. ‘Dullness may be disagreeable, but it seldom causes offense or insult. … Alas, to the series creator’s great discredit, The Romanoffs manages to do both.'”

“MoviePass’ business model was not sustainable because there was no reasonable basis to believe MoviePass could monetize the model to a degree that could be maintained before being too buried in debt to survive,” shareholder Jeffrey Braxton argued in his suit, which seeks class action status. A significant turning point for the company came on July 27, when Helios disclosed in a regulatory filing that it couldn’t make payments to its merchants, and that resulted in a service interruption. The company’s stock plummeted, losing 96% of its value since that SEC filing.

“Oscar the Grouch, thank you for helping me learn as a small child that one can get in bad moods, and it’s not the end of the world,” wrote one New York Times reader in response to the news that the puppeteer behind Oscar and Big Bird is retiring after 50 years. One child psychologist “said that Oscar personified the jumble of strong feelings that children experience and must learn to sort out.”

“It’s absolutely going to have a profound impact. There’s no question. Everyone was lined up on the tarmac to make films there and make financing deals. That party, overnight, is going to be over.”

Carroll Spinney, now 84, has been playing the two characters since the show’s launch in 1969 and has appeared in thousands of episodes (not to mention a feature film, a documentary, and guest appearances on other shows).

“At the start of the Cold War, a prominent group of women, who had worked their way up in broadcast media in the 1930s and ’40s, were poised to use the new medium of television to create the kind of inclusive, intersectional content that is only today finding traction. Then, the blacklist, a vicious, hearsay-riddled manifest of Hollywood talent with ties to Communism, silenced their creative output. It effectively turned back on the dial of progressive representations on TV by decades.”

Eighty million subscribers watched Netflix romcoms this summer. Netflix released a series original movies as part of its “Summer of Love” over the past few months, including “Set It Up,” “The Kissing Booth,” “Like Father,” “Sierra Burgess Is a Loser” and the aforementioned “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.” The company said Tuesday that it was already in production of “the next set of original rom-coms” for its members.

“Based on real events, Kler (The Clergy), by the director Wojciech Smarzowski, which includes testimonies of survivors, features an alcoholic priest who encourages his lover to have an abortion, a priest accused of abusing a young boy, a senior cleric engaged in corruption and blackmail, and a grotesque, foul-mouthed archbishop cutting deals with politicians and mobsters, all operating with impunity.” Despite denunciations by conservative laypeople and churchmen, the film is breaking box office records and encouraged many victims to speak out.

French director Jacques Audiard won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival for directing The Sisters Brothers. How did one of France’s greatest filmmakers, who consistently discusses and urges more gender equality in film, wind up with a hypermasculine Western?