The director says “he has tried to portray the reality of crime and therefore chose actors who were familiar with it. ‘If real criminals or people who have had personal experiences with crime and law come forward and act in such a movie, then it is not acting for them, it becomes real. All the characters become themselves in the movie and dialogues will not seem like dialogues but actual conversation’.”
Month: March 2006
The Rise Of Clip Culture
“Major broadcasters are emphasising the need to deliver their content across multiple platforms including conventional television, downloads and streaming services, as well as wireless devices. Based on pilot projects and other small-scale initiatives, it is fair to say that this future is already here.”
Da Vinci Plagiarism Case In Final Arguments
Summing up the plaintiffs’ case of plagiarism against Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, Jonathan Rayner James QC sounds more like a man complaining about a verdict he knows is coming than someone marshalling evidence. He said Brown had been “unco-operative” in court. “He had almost no recollection of matters that related to issues of timing.”
Vettriano: Who Cares About Critics?
Jack Vettriano’s paintings are wildly popular with the public, and his work fetches huge prices. But he takes a workman’s attitude to art: “It’s wall decoration for me, I don’t regard it as this big meaningful thing. My subjects are men and women getting off, that’s all. Mind you, some people don’t think sex is serious, but I happen to think it’s terribly serious.”
Do You YouTube?
“Thousands of amateur video clips, rare footage of music concerts and home-made film spoofs are now being uploaded every day to the video-sharing website YouTube for the enjoyment of millions of web users around the world. Allowing the public to watch and share clips for free, it has become an unprecedented platform for amateur film-makers to show off their home movies. But music labels, film studios and television bosses are now cracking down on the site.”
Plays Fresh As The News
Plays ripped from the headlines can give us a different perspective on those stories. “Ultimately, theater is mostly about being pulled into stories — familiar ones, new ones. And as polarizing or perplexing as our present-day stories can be, they come to us from a different angle in the theater than from our TV sets or computer screens.”
Just What, Is The Virginia Quarterly Review?
“To the astonishment of glossy magazine types everywhere, a small journal in Virginia garnered not one nomination, as is sometimes politely handed down to such journals, but six. This made the Virginia Quarterly Review the second-most-nominated magazine, behind the Atlantic, which received eight, and ahead of The New Yorker, Harper’s, New York, and National Geographic, all of which received five. It was as if a scrappy farm team had demolished the Yankees in an exhibition game.”
Hispanic Society Moves Downtown
New York’s Hispanic Society is moving from its obscure upper Manhattan location to downtown. The Society is “probably the most unknown major museum in the US. Its holdings of Spanish art, decorative arts, photographs, rare books and manuscripts are the most extensive outside of Spain, and worth billions of dollars.”
London Bombs Scared Off Museum-Goers
Last summer’s bombs in London caused a big drop in museum attendance. “Total UK museum visitor numbers were down by almost two million in 2005. Visits to the capital’s museums in August 2005 were down 24% on the same month the previous year, according to government figures. But attendance numbers are now rising again, the Department for Media, Culture and Sport has said.”
The New NPR – Money And Ambition
What has national Public Radio done with its gift of $230 million from Joan Kroc’s estate? For one thing, “NPR has created nearly 70 new jobs in its newsroom, many of them for reporters on newly created beats like police and prisons, labor, international economics, the environment, technology and the media. And all this as other news organizations have been paring their staffs and scaling back their ambitions as consumers and advertisers drift away.”